One of the three exhibitions of SB14

Claire Tancons - biography

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 contemporary 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.

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27 participants

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