Sharjah Biennial 7: Belonging

The 7th Sharjah Biennial addresses issues of belonging, identity, and cultural location. These are not new issues, but our current culture of mobility, mass migration, and so-called globalisation—which threatens the erosion of culturally distinctive places and the international cultural flows of the postcolonial world—make these issues more pressing than ever. We are now territorialized in a way that has serious consequences for our collective and individual identities. As individuals, many of us are increasingly affected by issues of belonging that are related to geography, culture, and borders, the implication being that the link between identity and place has become problematic.

There is at present a new and profound sense of loss of territorial roots, together with the knowledge that when it comes to history, there are no universal truths. In 1942 in wartime Europe, Simone Weil described the need to be rooted as perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. The uprootedness of migrants, refugees, and exited and stateless peoples has created a new diaspora. Edward Saïd describes his exile from Palestine as a ‘kind of doubleness: 'Instead of looking at an experience as a single unitary thing, it's always got at least two aspects: the aspect of the person who is looking at it and has always seen it, looking at it now and seeing it now, and then as you are looking at it now you can remember what it would have been like to took at something similar in that other place from which you carne.'

Although this is experienced firsthand by exiled and displaced peoples who suffer from a pervasive sense of homelessness, it is also felt, albeit in a different manner, by those who live between different cultures. Throughout the twentieth century, the ever-increasing mobility of people around the globe has produced a peculiar uprootedness that consists not so much of lacking roots but of having roots in various places. This is accompanied by the awareness that there is not a unique dominant culture, a centre that gives us an illusion of coherence and provides a calmness to our existence; rather, there exist different ways of looking at reality and different cultures and subcultures that challenge the idea of a seemingly hegemonic culture even within the same geographical space.

The need to search for unity extends beyond the limits established by territory. Multiculturalism challenges and at the same time exhibits the vulnerability of the idea of a unique, sovereign centre, acknowledging a diversity of separate societies, each with its own culture. In this respect, it is worthwhile remembering that the word 'cosmopolitan' originally meant ‘citizens of the cosmos' and that it is a concept that emphasises what unites us as human beings rather than the particularisms that characterise our society.

Art inhabits the border and provides a means for exploring and questioning issues at the core of our existence. The main part of the 7th Sharjah Biennial looks at preconceived ideas about identity and place that are assumed in imperial, patriarchal, nationalist, or fundamentalist discourses: What does it mean to belong to a culture? What does it mean to speak of 'a culture’, 'a people', 'a tribe', 'a nation'? How are the local, the regional, and the global interconnected? Can new spatial metaphors convey the new sense of dislocation and displacement that we are experiencing? How do the mass media contribute to an awareness of our fundamental similarities and differences? What does it mean to belong to a place when the majority of us have access to worldwide news and entertainment? Artists may be more concerned with asking pertinent questions than with offering definitive answers.

Our thanks must go first and foremost to the artists participating in the 7th Sharjah Biennial. Their willingness to share their work with us has placed great demands on them, and we very much appreciate their generosity. We extend our grateful thanks to the curators and coordinators, without whom this project would not have been possible. We acknowledge with gratitude the editors, authors, translators, designers, and the many other people involved in the production of this catalogue. To the many departments of the government of Sharjah, in particular the Cultural Department. I would like to record here my appreciation of their commitment. Finally, we would also like to thank the sponsors for their much-needed support for our programmes.

© Hoor Al Qasimi, President & Chief Director, Sharjah Biennial