The 13th edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art will focus on artists whose practices are defined by acts of solidarity and the creation of alliances through collaboration. By embodying these principles, the selected artists respond to and are shaped by social changes through the openness of their work and their partnerships with one another. The biennial’s concept is based on an understanding that artists play a crucial role in addressing and navigating contemporary challenges. With Basma al-Sharif.
Bringing together the works of 40 international artists, the exhibition After the end. Cartographies for Another Time , curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, will question the Western narrative that is rooted in a colonial system through stories both new and ancestral, popular and modern. Highlighting the importance of communities, the exhibition will explore the issue of the diaspora and the limits of the intelligibility of modernity in order to imagine other worlds beyond the end of time and beyond our own time.
How is motherhood shaped by politics, history and migration? How do war, displacement and inheritance affect the relationship between mothers, children and society?
The exhibition is kaleidoscope of perspectives: from personal memory and embodied practice to colonial histories and institutional critique, and from the technological mediation of care to centuries-old ritual objects that have crossed borders and epochs.
Online screening of the artist’s first feature film, with a special introduction KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
Basma Alsharif, Ouroboros, 2017. Photo © Tadzio
“An evening that takes us from Beirut, Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, Gaza and Jerusalem to Spitsbergen, Iceland, Brittany and the Mojave Desert. Featuring films by artists who look at landscapes from the perspective of recollection and exile, such as Basma Alsharif’s experimental film Ouroboros (2017) and Mira Adoumier’s visual essay Errans (2019)” The evening is curated by Nat Muller, guest curator of the exhibition “Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality & Fiction”. With an introduction by Lara Khaldi. Followed by a Q&A with Basma Alsharif.
Image: Basma Alsharif, Ouroboros, 2017. Installation view.
A month of free films (by Palestinian women) for a free Palestine, with woks by Jumana Manna, Basma Alsharif, Rosalind Nashashibi, Razan AlSalah, Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, Larissa Sansour, Emily Jacir, Mona Benyamin, Lokman Slim/Monika Borgmann, Pary El-Qalqili, Layaly Badr, Shuruq Harb, Mai Masri & more tbc!
Screenings from 6 to 11pm on site and online (via the gallery’s YouTube account) With: Wang Shui, Himali Singh Soin, Tania Ximena, Garush Melkonyan, Luiz Roque, Basma Alsharif, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Yang Fudong, Kandis Williams, Karrabing Film Collective, Laura Huertas Millán, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Fernando Ocaña Curated by: Samantha Ozer
Basma Alsharif, Ouroboros, 2017, Film still
The exhibition presents a selection of 60 films bringing into perspective generations, origins, geographies, histories in extremely varied narrative forms. This exhibition, a cartography of time, questions our contemporary world. It is deployed in five successive chapters – five stages – which expose and decline forms of resistance, of “disquiet”.
Basma Alsharif, The story of milk and honey, film still, 2011
Screening of Basma Alsharif’s film in the framework of the Queer Festival for Palestine. Complete program: CONGRESS OF IDLING PERSONS, Bassem Saad, 2021, 36 min; THE WHITE ELEPHANT, Shuruq Harb, 2018, 12 min and O, PERSECUTED, Basma Alsharif, 2014, 11 min
Basma Alsharif, O, Persecuted, 2014
The Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series Al-Sharif’s newest work, Capital—comprising a two-channel video and a series of banners depicting architectural renderings of proposed urban spaces— (…) hint at the limits of free speech and reveal how the legacies of fascism live on in the present.
Basma Alsharif, Capital, 2021. Video still
The group exhibition Back of My Hand is based on the way in which different artists work the poetic and political potential of hand, and its relationship with certain dynamics involved in the (in)visibility of images. In this sense, this exhibition presents a series of works in which the hand appears as a mechanism of action, revelation or performativity, aiming to question certain structures of knowledge and historical narrative, and to reflect about a tensioned space between what the image makes visible, and what exists in it in resistance and unintelligibility. Curated by Sara Castelo Branco
Basma al-Sharif, Deep Sleep, 2014. © Basma al-Sharif
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an international exhibition of contemporary art being held in Kochi, Kerala every two years. Through the celebration of contemporary art from around the world, The Kochi-Muziris Biennale seeks to invoke the historic cosmopolitan legacy of the modern metropolis of Kochi, and its mythical predecessor, the ancient port of Muziris. In cooperation with the Muziris Heritage Project, The Kochi–Muziris Biennale seeks to link the past with the modern day present. This 5th edition is curated by the artist and writer Shubigi Rao.
“This edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale therefore embodies the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim. There is optimism even in the darkest absurdity, and this is what leavens the direness of our time. It is in the robustness of humour that we can imagine the possibility of sustained kinship, and remember that we are not isolated in this fight. And that perhaps all that is required for an impossible ideal to exist is for enough people to live, think, and work as if it already does.” Shubigi Rao.
Basma al-Sharif is nominated for the AWARE 2024 prize.
