By Visual Production
The 8th Sharjah Biennial ceremoniously raised the curtain under the concerns from all walks of life recently.
The Sharjah Biennial was initiated in 1993 and is produced by the Department of Culture and Information of the Emirate of Sharjah. Sharjah Biennial occupies a quite important regional position in aspect of art creating and showing and gestating practice activity. The Sharjah Biennial 8 (SB8) will present various attempts in visual arts and film that address the growing social, political and environmental challenges the world is facing due to excessive urban development, pollution, political ambitions, and the thoughtless misuse, abuse and exhaustion of natural resources.
SB8 will focus on the renewed role of art in addressing a wide range of issues that directly and radically affect, and in an alarming magnitude the human existence on this earth (man's relation to earth and earth's relation to man). The biennial will not only stand for these issues as a venue and a platform for presentations, exhibits and discussions, but will take an active role in commissioning artists to produce new work corresponding to the topic at hand and will also partner with institutions to stimulate wider involvement with the issues brought up particularly amongst educational institutions.
Whilst the UAE is now a modern thriving entity, 50 years ago the towns were small with few facilities - electricity was powered by generator and water supplied by well. The leap into the developed world has taken place over a very short span of time. An enormous amount of adjustment and flexibility by the national people, have been key factors sustaining this change. The Biennial strives to encourage collaboration between artists, art institutions and organisations locally, regionally and internationally, and to promote cross cultural exchange. This year, the Biennial will once again, offer the entire city of Sharjah to artists for the creation of new site-specific work.
The works from local artists presented various kinds of local life, politics and economics in this exhibition. El Anatsui's work Hover 2 for this biennial can be looked at from two perspectives: the medium and the process. Liquor bottletops to me represent the medium. The process, stitching all of them into a large sheet, not only attempts to valorize an evolutionary pace of doing things but also references rating of labor. Noor Al-Bastaki created the work Steps and Paths for this biennial fully showed that confident steps of youth, armed with knowledge and will, filled with determination and life, on a road fraught with difficulties, confusion and fear. Steps forward or jumps high to surpass all obstacles standing in the road to the future… Holding the torch of knowledge and dreams and climbing the rough mountains, armed with what he owns of oil wealth, to reach the peak, and plant the torch to lighten the paths of others... So will this oil wealth determine the future and fate of youth? Or will youth's determination and ambition do that? Or Both?
Most of the works reflected the artists' high concerns about the environmental protection in this exhibition. Gustav Metzger's work Model for Stockholm showed us that the result of this human being's modus operandi: damage the environment, OK. And then repair it: clean it up, change your technology. A viable path into the future. Like radiation from a nuclear reactor at the point of no return, the Ozone Layer and the Greenhouse Layer entered the equation and stand, Like Chernobyl, before the world, as a warning and worse, as an uncontrollable event that can bring all down. We all knew that the immense wealth of Sharjah was from geological deposits of petroleum generated in the past century, Peter Fend's work Installation view guessed it possibly still generated for another century. It gives those living in most the semi-arid or arid regions where petroleum is found-namely Arabia and Iran-an opportunity unique in human and geological history: to return what is now desert to savannah; to increase seaweeds and fishes in salt seas；to restore one-time hordes of wild-land animals. A work of Shield aroused us attention .While artist Bright Ugochukwu Eke was talking about the idea of creating, he said: "Recently, I was attacked by acid rain while working at one of the largest industrial cities in Nigeria. This bitter experience inspired my Acid Rain installation, which was presented at the recent Dak'Art Biennial 2006.Accompanying the work Acid Rain was another piece Shields. This I did by recycling the "pure water" sachets into a "shield" of raincoats and umbrellas. Indeed, man, as a result of his insatiable need for comfort and pleasure, has altered the nature. The alteration has no doubt occurred as a result of the production of hazardous waste, pollution. My concern is the conflict between man and nature." Mona Hatoum's Projection is a white on white work that uses cotton and abaca to create a positive-negative reversal where the continents appear as submerged recesses. The title "Projection" was chosen to imply projecting or looking into the future. This again can be seen as a portrayal of an apocalyptic view of the world.
Part of the works in this exhibition also had the specific angle of view reflected the artists' allegory towards the politics. As female artist Cornelia Parker's work Heart of Darkness, 2004 for this Biennial, which was an installation created with burnt wood retrieved from a forest fire in Baker County, Florida. The fire, dubbed 'Impassable I', was intended to be a controlled burn by the U.S. Forest Service, but due to extreme weather conditions quickly became a wildfire that consumed tens of thousands of acres. When Anawana Haloba talked about his work Lamentations, he said: "My work is a result of the different thoughts going on in my mind, or, what I would call the noises in my mind. The way I react and place myself in this world is reflected in these 'mind discussions'. When I work I bring out my inner thoughts to interact with the outside thoughts. I am described as a feminist or political, but I would rather say I deal with social crisis." Tomas Saraceno's Flying garden-Air-Port-City.
Like clouds moving, flying gardens redefine geographical and political boundaries, generating human and political communities in transformation. These Air-Port-Cities world be freely constituted in compliance with international laws, challenging the political, social, cultural and military restrictions presently around the world.
This Sharjah Biennial was aware of the critical ambiguity of the subject we touch, of its growing importance and the great responsibility it carries with it. And inasmuch as Sharjah, being part of the UAE - whose economy is mainly based on fuel reserves and recently benefited tremendously from its power resources utilizing them to create a superficial, man-made world, with its addiction to cars, high-rises and technological progress – may become an easy target for criticism considering the theme of SB8. However, seeing the desert turning lush green signifies that the people of this place are obviously trying to use the resources they have to create a more comfortable place on earth, a place more luxurious than it once was, a sort-of man-made Garden of Eden. Still, they need to be critical, because art does not exist in some insulated, privileged realm. The organizer's approach of Sharjah Biennial could be a positive gesture in the global conversation about this looming threat.
While talking about the significance of this Biennial, the organizers said: "When we look at a big chunk of the new inventions and developments in the world, their main focus is on facilitating and smoothing out core tasks in our daily lives, automate certain procedures and mechanize/digitize them. Yet all this is leading to an even bigger consumption of energy and resources. Arguably, we have the responsibility to infiltrate and contaminate the thinking pattern of people by spreading suspicion about the cost of this development frenzy and the price we or the future generations will have to pay. This biennial will assert a strategy of "contamination" rather than insulation, falling in with other attempts to merge together art, society, and environmental issues. We are not here to judge, or tell people how to live their lives, but aiming to problematize these concerns in order to understand our everyday relationship to nature and the environment, and our responsibility towards them. Our aim is to implicate all sectors of society into questioning our social, political, and ecological praxis."
Walk into Sharjah, you can experience this country is a mixture of old and modern, where the eastern and western cultures collide, which produce the complicated and lured magic power; Come into Sharjah Biennial, you can realize the people who live in this land with fine and smooth sense and deep thinking . Art is a kind of side face of expression. In a sense, life itself is the art marching forward. This is what Sharjah Biennial exhibition want to state to visitor.