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MM2023 Programme ►
Download the programme from the website of the Sharjah Art Foundation
The 15th edition of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual March Meeting The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960, will convene artists, curators and art practitioners as well as students from around the world to discuss vital issues revolving around Sharjah Biennial 15’s overarching theme: Thinking Historically in the Present. March Meeting 2023 (MM 2023) builds on the two previous iterations of the meeting—The Afterlives of the Postcolonial (MM 2022) and Unravelling the Present (MM 2021)—that were similarly conceived as part of the SB15 programming in relationship to the late Okwui Enwezor’s conception of the ‘Postcolonial Constellation’.
The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Politics after 1960 examines the forces that have shaped the production and reception of art across the world from 1960 to the present, reconfiguring the cartographies of global modernism and contemporary art. It will offer discursive space to explore artistic, political and cultural positions traversing subalternity and self-determination, first nation and Indigenous practices, creolisation, hybridity and supranational formations, such as the Black Atlantic, diasporas, exile and statelessness. It will thus constitute a dynamic intersection of artistic, ideological and philosophical perspectives on decolonisation—a field of scholarship originally developed within postcolonial studies.
Delineating a moment in which the notion of a consolidated nation-state is challenged by the remarkable resilience of individual, non-state and counter-institutional models of sovereignty, autonomy, identity and subjectivity, The Postcolonial Constellation studies the global political, social and economic systemic and structural shifts that have characterised our world since the 1960s. It does so by revisiting and reanimating the archives and histories of this period; by examining contemporaneous artistic and political practices, theories and cultural production testifying to that time and by presenting ideas, artists, artworks and critical theory that offer parallactic views of our convulsive world.
The Postcolonial Constellation reflects on the movements and interactions of artists, filmmakers, performers, thinkers, writers, philosophers, public intellectuals, activists, guerrilla movements and other societal actors within and beyond the limiting framework of the ‘sovereign nation-state’. To the extent that The Postcolonial Constellation understands the global present as intimately tied to histories of the postcolonial, MM 2023 and the other platforms of SB15 constitute critical spaces for ‘thinking historically in the present’.
(© From texts of the Sharjah Art Foundation)
MM2023 Programme ►
Talks, panels and presentations at The Africa Hall, Sharjah. Performances and film screenings at Sharjah Art Foundation venues and partner institutions. Excursions to exhibition venues of the Sharjah Biennial 15.
Download the programme from the website of the Sharjah Art Foundation
Register to attend March Meeting 2023
More information - SAF website:
Talks and panels from the 2021 and 2022 editions:
Programme 2021 and Programme 2022
The March Meeting Papers, a series of eleven commissioned essays by art historians and scholars chosen through the March Meeting 2021 open call:
March Meeting Papers
Sharjah Biennial 15, 2023
Thinking Historically in the Present
7 February - 11 June 2023
Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi,
based on the concept of Okwui Enwezor who was invited to curate SB15 before his untimely passing in 2019
List of artists
Over 150 participants from more than 70 countries
SB15 Working Group, Enwezor’s longtime collaborators:
Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Ute Meta Bauer, Salah M. Hassan, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Octavio Zaya
SB15 Advisory Committee:
Sir David Adjaye OBE, Christine Tohmé
