Gabrielle Goliath
‘Legacy’ conjures for me the congratulatory aura of white male ‘genius’ – a baton of patriarchal, colonial privilege passed from one damaging imagination of greatness to another. This is not how I choose to remember Okwui Enwezor, who in my opinion sought to trouble a hegemonic, canonical economy of representation – upending the racial exclusion that has, for so long, underwritten the project of art history with a capital ‘H’. His work was, for me, about radical openings rather than entrenching new norms; rethinking conditions of possibility and always in relation to the many ways in which black, brown, femme, queer, and indigenous art practices imagine and perform the world differently.
When Hoor Al Qasimi invited me to participate in Sharjah Biennial 15, a thunderstorm of epic proportions was descending upon the city of Johannesburg, where I reside. Thunder, lightning, and sheets of rain made our Zoom conversation almost impossible. Nevertheless, I sensed something important in this moment – an opening. An opening to curatorial care, attentive conversations, and an ongoing commitment to disrupting art world legacies in ways that foster new communities and affective encounters. Whilst it is appropriate to recall and value Okwui Enwezor on this occasion, I cannot do so without similarly celebrating Hoor, and a number of other luminescent women curators I am currently engaging with. That These three remain (2023) – the first instalment of my love trilogy – will debut at one of the most significant Global South art platforms in the world is enormously meaningful to me. This 12-channel sound and light installation resonates with what I call the disorderly remains of possibility; as quotidian practices of love, survival, intimacy, pleasure, care, and imagination, within and despite the tangled afterlives of enslavement, displacement, indenture, and extraction.
Farah Al Qasimi
The theme ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’ is especially prescient to me upon reflection of the growth of museum culture in the Emirates and the presentation of a monolithic view of our history. I think artists have an important opportunity to synthesize different kinds of historic information through a human filter, and the acknowledgment of subjectivity or fiction gives us greater room for nuance and complexity. For my biennial commission, I researched the piracy allegations made against the Al Qasimis by the British East India Company in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The letters and exchanges describing this history exploit ideas of justice and charity under the guise of eradicating evil; a well-used tactic to support the growth of the British Empire. This history has been challenged extensively by Dr. Sultan Al Qasimi, whose eponymous centre is a wealth of archival information, but I was also interested in writing a fictional piece around this resistance that weaves it into the present.
In the film, the ghost of a pirate who died defending Ras Al Khaimah in a siege befriends two young women – and on a parallel screen, we learn about the many facets of piracy: as resistance, as popular culture, as a perceived embodiment of chaos and lawlessness. The primary narrator is Umm Al Dhabab (Mother of Fog), a jinni of unknown origin who points us towards the inescapability of the past and the slipperiness of justice.
Vivan Sundaram
I met Okwui Enwezor at the Havana Biennal in 1997. He responded to the way I interlink personal, archival, and historical elements in my practice and invited me the same year to the Johannesburg Biennale. In 2018, he hosted a survey exhibition of my work at Haus der Kunst, Munich (with Deepak Ananth as curator). Sixty years of my art practice is marked by disjunctures. I work with different ‘languages’, diverse mediums, memory archives, and historical contexts. The title of this exhibition was ‘Disjunctures’.
Okwui is remembered for his monumental documenta11. Among his other audacious curations, I have seen the operatic rendering of Das Kapital at the Venice Biennale in 2015. I was present at the inauguration of ‘Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965’, a historical and transcultural exhibition where Okwui’s unexpected juxtapositions illumined the historical presence of artists from the South, alongside critical frameworks and political solidarities in the post-war and post-colonial decades.
Hoor Al Qasimi has activated what Okwui called the ‘postcolonial constellation’. Taken together with its yearly ‘March Meeting’ of critics and curators, and its comradely association with The Africa Institute, Sharjah Art Foundation is a space for investigating imperialism, the exploitative ideology of neo-liberal capitalism, and the hate-ridden politics of the global Right.
I feel honored to be part of Sharjah Biennial 15, envisioned through Okwui’s signal statement: ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’. Okwui’s proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way. I present a photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), a choreography of bodies that have undergone violence, experienced incarceration, and lived through mourning. The sixth ‘station’ signifies a journey premised on the historical and rehearsed with activist resolve.
Gabrielle Goliath is represented by Goodman Gallery (Cape Town, Johannesburg and London) and Galleria Raffaella Cortese (Milan).
Farah Al Qasimi is represented by The Third Line (Dubai).
Vivan Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Road (Mumbai) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).
The Sharjah Biennial 15 takes place from February 7 to June 11, 2023.
Published on February 2, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed image: Okwui Enwezor, Haus der Kunst, 2014. Photograph by Maximilian Geuter.