6.02 –
15.06

The Water that Asked for a Fish at Sharjah Biennial 16

The Water that Asked for a Fish by Mariam M. Alnoaimi at Sharjah Biennial 16

Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry
Opening programme: 6–9 February 2025
Exhibition continues until 15 June 2025

We look forward to the premiere exhibition of the artist film The Water that Asked for a Fish  commissioned by The Wapping Project and Sharjah Art Foundation, presented alongside an archive of voices, images, objects and research materials gathered in the process of developing and making the work.

The Water that Asked for a Fish weaves together traditional and invented rituals to consider relationships with bodies of water within the Gulf region – both contemporary and historical – and the underlining preciousness and fragility of these living entities that sustain human and more-than-human life as well as culture, economy, social bonds and belonging.

On 18-20 April 2025, within the programme April Acts of the Biennial, Mariam will present a series of public events around the work and her broader research practice.

The Water that Asked for a Fish was commissioned and produced by The Wapping Project, co-commissioned with Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennial 16, 2025, supported by Art Jameel and British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform.


to carry a home
to carry a history
to carry a trade
to carry a wound
to carry equatorial heat
to carry resistance
to carry a library of redacted documents
to carry rupture
to carry Te Pō [the beginnings]
to carry change
to carry songs
to carry on
to carry land
to carry the language of the inner soul
to carry new formations
to carry the embrace of a river current
to carry sisterhood and communal connection
to carry the rays of a morning without fear

 

The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.

The Biennial theme, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 features works by more than 190 participants, including over 200 new commissions, which will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah.