Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, opening January 2027. Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda, Angola.
“Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact," said Hoor Al Qasimi, SAF President and Director. "Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories. Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.”
Working in close collaboration, the mandate for the curators is to shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah emirate.
“The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,” said Harutyunyan. “I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.”
For Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with structures and models of exhibition-making, as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. “I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between art making and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art's capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,” she said.
Based in Berlin, Angela Harutyunyan (b. 1982, Gyumri, Armenia) is a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research. She has curated several exhibitions, including This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time (with Nat Muller) at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2014) and the American University of Beirut Art Galleries (2015).
She obtained her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Manchester in 2009 and previously taught at the American University in Cairo (2009-2010) and also at the American University of Beirut (2011–2023). One of the founding editors of ARTMargins, she has extensively researched and written on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. She is the author of The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the 'painterly real’ 1987–1994 (Manchester University Press, 2017). She has published internationally on the autonomy of art, art and the public sphere, cultural politics and curatorial practices in the post-Socialist condition and in the Middle East.
Paula Nascimento’s (b. 1981, Luanda, Angola) practice is rooted at the intersection of visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education. She engages with interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. An associate curator of the sixth and seventh editions of the Lubumbashi Biennial (2019, 2022), she has also developed projects and curated exhibitions internationally, including Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography, Experimenta Design, Triennale di Milano and the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for best national participation in 2013. She is a curatorial advisor to Hangar Centre of Artistic Research, Lisbon, and a member of the acquisitions committee of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. In 2023, Nascimento was a member of the visual arts jury for the annual DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, a platform for artistic and cultural exchange in and beyond Europe.
SAF is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. It provides an experimental and wide-ranging programme model, supporting the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the culture of the region and encourages an understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.
Established in 2009 to expand programmes beyond the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, SAF is a significant resource for artists and cultural organisations in the Gulf and a monitor of local, regional and international developments in contemporary art. The Foundation is committed to developing and sustaining the cultural life and heritage of Sharjah; it is reflected through year-round exhibitions, performances, screenings and educational programmes, mainly hosted in historic buildings that have been repurposed as cultural and community centres. A growing collection reflects the Foundation’s support of contemporary artists in the realisation of new work and its recognition of the contributions made by pioneering modern artists from the region and around the world. SAF is a legally independent public body established by Emiri Decree and supported by government funding, grants from national and international non-profits, cultural organisations, corporate sponsors and individual patrons. All its exhibitions are free and open to the public.