Sharjah Biennial 14: Look for Me All Around You

“Look for Me All Around You” is an open platform of migrant images and fugitive forms. Composed of multiple scores drawn from the many scales of Sharjah as city, emirate and peninsular territory, these after-images and after-forms circumnavigate global history, meeting through the confluence of the Gulfs of Mexico and Oman and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in a call-and-response between the Americas and the Emirates.
Par for the diasporic course, the migratory journey, the heretic pilgrimage, “Look for Me All Around You” takes as a point of departure political activist and pan-African leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr’s (1887–1940) unrelenting address to “Look for me in the whirlwind or a storm, look for me all around you…” (1925). The platform attests to the alternatively dispossessive and repossessive disposition of diasporisation as an aporetic phenomenon of the contemporary, encompassing human, semantic and material forms of displacement. As a contrapuntal proposal that may not fully be registered in the realm of the retinal embedded in hegemonic structures of looking, learning and feeling, “Look for Me All Around You” manifests in a state of emergence under conditions of performance.
It revels in displaced artefacts, coded languages, sonic disturbances, transient presences, light flashes and shadow imprints, revealing the immiscible historical flows and comparable con- temporary constituents of both the Arabian peninsula and the American continents and insular territories as results of human and natural resource extraction and exploitation. An always already othered time-space discontinuum, “Look for Me All Around You” bears witness to the imperilment of the contemporary within the atomised space between “me” and “you”. What is being “looked for” is not what is being “looked at”—if only it could be seen.

Participating artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Caline Aoun, Leo Asemota, Aline Baiana, Hannah Black and Ebba Fransén Waldhör, Mohamed Bourouissa, Jace Clayton, Chris- topher Cozier, Annie Dorsen, Torkwase Dyson, Alaa Edris, Alia Farid, Peter Friedl, Meschac Gaba, Nikolaus Gansterer, Eisa Jocson, Isabel Lewis, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Hacklander/Hatam, Laura Lima, Ulrik López, Carlos Martiel, Suchitra Mattai, Mohau Modisakeng, New Orleans Airlift, Tracey Rose, Wael Shawky, Cae- cilia Tripp, Wu Tsang

Sharjah Biennial 14
7 March – 10 June 2019
Free and open to the public
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info@sharjahart.org