Sharjah Art Foundation has announced Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17. Together they will collaborate to shape the upcoming biennial, which opens in January 2027.
Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, said: “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.’
Harutyunyan is professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at Berlin University of the Arts and has conducted in-depth research and published work on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, the politics of historical time, and curatorial theory. Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda whose practice employs interdisciplinary approaches to explore contemporary interpretations of historical themes, particularly in the context of Africa and the Global South.”
Harutyunyan shared her vision for the next edition of the biennial. “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. 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 crucial platforms for experimentation, community gathering and transformation. “I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking 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 expressed.
