Drought is a state of being. It is quite empty here. People are sitting underneath the shadows of palm trees. How much money is invested in this? How many people will see it? Capital is god-like, stronger than the environment.
From the bus window, the desert stretched infinitely, interrupted only by workers in orange vests. I found myself sketching the above observations, which in my mind depicted the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) central contradiction: a wealthy economy built on labor rendered simultaneously essential and invisible.
Despite labor reforms such as the 2019 Golden Visa program, the UAE remains reliant on migrant workers. Non-citizens constitute over 88% of the population. They come mostly from South and Southeast Asia. Capital manifests through air-conditioned enclaves built by those who cannot enjoy them—a colonial logic where ecosystems and labor are reconfigured to serve capital accumulation. This sort of reflection on labor systems starkly resonated while looking at artworks from the 16th Sharjah Biennial. Its title, to carry, connects, at least conceptually, with the revitalized land-specific labor traditions proposed by its curators Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Natasha Ginwala, Megan Tamati-Quennell, and Zeynep Özm. They offer a cartography of alternative work cultures through which we might glimpse the aftermath of a capitalist world. Featuring 600 works, one third of them newly commissioned, “to carry” tries, not in vain, to move away from prescriptive exhibition-making, focusing instead on ways of carrying knowledge rooted in Indigenous knowledge-making and in embodied heritages without reducing the exhibition to a single thematic frame.
To compliment this complexity, over the past years, the Sharjah Foundation, headed by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, has reclaimed heritage locations across the Emirate to be repurposed for art exhibitions. The seventeen venues, including the Al Qasimiyah School, the Old Al Dhaid Clinic, and the buried village of Al Madam, places where the arenas of production and labor relations would be crafted in all their stages, created bridges between international perspectives and the local landscape while strategically positioning Sharjah on global art itineraries.
The Kalba Ice Factory, once a site of manual labor in the 1970s, was repurposed in 2012 by the Sharjah Biennial to host large-scale installations, artistic labor embedded in post-industrial space. There, Like a Flood (2025), a two-channel video installation by Adelita Husni-Bey, offers a sweeping historical and infrastructural critique of water management in Libya under Italian colonial rule (1911–1943). The work reveals how control over water became a tool for territorial domination, cultural erasure, and the violent reordering of ecological relationships.
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To tame the land, the Italian regime not only dismantled organized resistance, but they also targeted bodies carrying ecological cosmologies: oral traditions, rituals, and embodied knowledge systems rooted in land and water. Erasing those bodies was an attempt to sever ancestral continuity and displace modes of knowing that challenged colonial authority. Yet these attempts failed. What survives in memory, sound, and flesh unsettles the colonial fantasy of total control.
Water, here too, becomes an instrument of domination. As the Palestinian sound researcher and artist Bint Mbareh states during the April Acts conversation “Water Songs” (with Caroline Courrioux, Hsu Fang-Tze, and Amal Khalaf): “Water ownership is a way to impose a future on Palestinian land and the population.” The dynamics exposed in Like a Flood resonate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since 1967, as Amnesty International reports, Israeli military authorities have monopolized their water resources and infrastructure, denying Palestinians equitable access to a vital commons.
But Mbareh’s practice turns the body into an acoustic site of resistance. “The body sheds tears to belong back to the sea,” she whispers, reclaiming grief as a fluid, ancestral force. In her installation What’s Left (2023), presented in Al Manakh, revolutionary sound frequencies enter the listener’s body, bypassing narrative and language. Here, the body becomes an archive of survival, vibrating with intergenerational solidarity, memory, and defiance. These submerged stories rise again.
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The epistemological subject of water as a way to radically rethink relationships between beings and forces in the world today, centering the fluid nature of life against the constrictive nature of border regimes and colonialism, was a major conceptual undercurrent of the biennial. Thinking about the circularity of water means recognizing its vital role in agricultural ecosystems and how its contamination disrupts natural cycles and the production of resources from the land. This revelatory interconnectedness is powerfully addressed in Yhonnie Scarce's Orford Ness (2022), and her new commission Operation Buffalo (2023), exhibited at the Kalba Ice Factory and Al Hamriyah Studios. In these works, over 2,000 hand-blown glass yam roots create haunting installations that mirror an acid rain whose fragile beauty belies the extractivist violence it represents. Scarce denounces the nuclear testing carried out by the British and Australian governments on Aboriginal land during the 1950s and 60s, revealing how such actions poisoned the soil and disrupted indigenous agricultural cultures. While visually striking, these installations nevertheless risk transforming ecological violence into consumable beauty for art tourists.
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A necessary encounter with the ghostly texture of everyday life in Sharjah came during a visit to the Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market, an empty 1980s souk, where disused fruit, vegetable, and flower stalls now serve as backdrops for artworks exploring harvesting and recycling practices. Some shops, still bearing traces of the merchants' presence—faded price lists, abandoned scales, and worn counters—offered a glimpse into Sharjah's port economy before modern supermarkets replaced these community hubs.
At the heart of the market's long corridor, a scent of fermenting hay in the market's warm, humid penumbra permeated my nostrils. Anga Art Collective's Storage of the Broken Times—ঋতু Ritu (2023) unfolds generously in a circular structure made of hay and textiles. Blending an archive of agricultural practices from the Assam region with a convivial space for gathering, the installation reimagines the market as a spiritual site echoing the six-season cycle of northeastern India. It offers a sensory meditation on the shifting cultures and livelihoods of agrarian communities living in the shadow of climate change. The loss of an ecosystem, and with it, systems of exchange and production, marks a quiet surrender to the homogenizing force of disaster capitalism.
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The seasonality of trade, which entailed not only circulation of products and merchandise but also of ideas and cultural kinship, was beautifully framed during the April Acts panel discussion, "Coastal Remembrance and Oceanic Belonging," led by Seema Alavi, Bettina Ng'weno, and Engseng Ho, and moderated by George Jose. The panel outlined the relationships sustained across the Indian Ocean, where countless ports, like mouths in conversation, disseminated goods and languages, carried by the winds of the monsoons.
Alavi's contribution, which illuminated key political moments in history when land and sea converged to foster spiritual and cultural resistance—what she described as "literature in transit"—a resistance that moves from places of exile to the intimate, domestic spaces shaped by the Indian Ocean. As contested by Engseng Ho, the ocean was not merely a space of positive connection, but also a liquid vehicle for imported colonial violence among the neighboring regions of South Asia.
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Chiming with Ho's critical analysis was kappai kari/küli kari (2023) by Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s three gouache scroll paintings hanging in soft waves, and bearing stories of lesser-known colonial labor routes, shown at the Sharjah Art Museum. Each scroll, measuring approximately three meters in length, depicts figures in vibrant colors against sepia backgrounds. The work traces the journey of indentured laborers, most of whom were women, from India under British rule to the sugar plantations of South Africa between 1860 and 1911. It offers a narrative from the perspective of the enslaved, evoking the aquatic crossroads of the Indian Ocean and challenging dominant histories that center the transatlantic segment of a global trade in human bodies. Instead, it reveals a looping, often erased, circuit of displacement from South Asia to Africa. The piece is both a political gesture and a personal homage to Simpson's ancestors, indentured women whose histories resist forgetting.
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A space of abundance, cosmological belief, and collective memory was offered by Womanifesto—a location-responsive, ever-evolving group of women artists primarily active in Thailand between 1997 and 2008. Their practice focuses on assembly as a mode of thinking. It is space-making, rather than art-making, that drives their work.
This spirit was palpable when I found relief from the heat within WeMend (2023–ongoing), a quilted, shelter-like structure installed in Calligraphy Square. Created by Nitaya Ueareeworkaul and Varsha Nair, two of Womanifesto's core organizers, alongside various women's communities from Thailand, India, and the UAE, the work invited us to pause from the press tour and contribute a stitch to the fabric. Sadly, I couldn't add my piece of fabric to the textile structure; entering the museum context, the piece was stripped of its processual, participatory nature. Still, the political power of gathering, of reappropriating narratives and memories together, was visibilized in the object.
Invisibilized labour was an even more explicit theme in the work of The Voice of Domestic Workers, a UK-based education and advocacy group campaigning for the rights of Britain's 16,000 migrant domestic workers. For over a decade, they have collaborated with artists, filmmakers, and institutions to expose the realities of migrant women's labor, from sexual harassment and racial violence to economic exploitation. Their efforts were represented through archival materials, protest documentation, and personal testimonies at the Al Qasimiyah School and in a moving conversation with Amal Khalaf during the April Acts dialogue "The Voice of Domestic Workers: Labour, Visibility and Art for Social Movements," where it was made clear how artistic practices can actively contribute to disseminating human rights work.
An important contribution, spoken from the embodied experience of those who seldom have access to international stages, provided a materialist critique of class and caste systems emerged during the conversation "Publishing as Part of Political Movements," featuring the Mexican collective RRD’s (Reproduction and Distribution Network) Bhumika Saraswati, and the Dalit artist-activist Siddhesh Gautam. Together, they explored how cultural militancy can platform marginalized voices.
From the Dalit-run publication All that Blue to nomadic kiosks in Mexico City showcasing grassroots and neighborhood media, the speakers emphasized the importance of autonomous distribution networks. Gautam noted that the Dalit community has historically been denied access to the physical means of cultural production: printing, painting, and publishing. This material restriction, he argued, contributes directly to the erasure of Dalit history. Reclaiming these tools, beyond the limited utility of digital devices, becomes an act of narrative resistance, transforming the condition of untouchability into autonomous forms of expression.
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To carry tirelessly addresses colonial violence throughout the exhibition venues, giving audiences access to indigenous and revolutionary ways of reclaiming society, organizing, fighting, and spiritually reproducing joy beyond exploitation. The stories presented from the axes of the so-called “Global South,” particularly in relation to migrant work, represent a troubling paradox: migrant workers enabled our artistic conversations about exploitation while remaining outside these discussions themselves. The globalized art system sanitizes its friction with the surrounding environment by means of conversations like these.
Despite these powerful voices, labor migration, the extraction economy threatening our ecological future, and the extractionist aesthetics fueling the art market remain aligned against them, perpetuated through the format of the Biennial itself. The separation of those who build art spaces, those represented within them, and those who access them reveals the fundamental contradiction of biennials: they speak about marginalized groups while primarily addressing an art world elite. Until these institutions confront their complicity in global capital flows and labor exploitation, they will remain performative gestures circulating within a closed system—speaking of exploited communities, but rarely to them, even more rarely through them.
Beyond the Biennial's curated environments, I hope we carry forward a different reality where labor's shifts must be transformed—not merely to serve, but to stand together in empathy and shared struggle with the oppressed, creating connections that endure long after the exhibition ends.
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- Image credits
Cover: Sancintya Mohini Simpson, kappal kari / kūli kari, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem
Fig. 1-2:Adelita Husni-Bey, Like a Flood, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation and made possible thanks to the Italian Council programme (2024), with Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai, and Museum of Civilisations, Rome; with additional support from LOCALES. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah, 2025. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic
Fig. 3-4: Bint Mbareh, What's Left?, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Al Qasimiyah School, Sharjah, 2025. Photo: Motaz Mawid
Fig. 5: Yhonnie Scarce, Operation Buffalo, 2024. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Al Hamriyah Studios, Sharjah, 2025. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
Fig. 6: Anga Art Collective, Adaara, 2024. From আবতৰীয়া বতাহ (‘Aabotariya Botah’), 2024. Comissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Old Jubail Vegetable Market, Sharjah, 2025. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamuladdin.
Fig. 7: Anga Art Collective, ঘূলি (Ghuli), 2024. From আবতৰীয়া বতাহ (‘Aabotariya Botah’), 2024. Comissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Old Jubail Vegetable Market, Sharjah, 2025. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamuladdin.
Fig. 8-9: Womanifesto - International Art Exchange, WeMend, 2023 – 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. In collaboration with Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), SEA Junction (South East Asia Junction), 15th AWID International Forum, Sunset.on.thebridge, Gazra Café, Shree Maharani Chimnabai Stree Udyogalaya, Komal Mistry’s home (Baroda, India), Tei Kobayashi’s home (Nogura Village, Japan), UP artists’ studios (Sydney, Australia), Master Kunst Hochschule (Luzern, Switzerland), Legler Areal (Glarus, Switzerland), Level Up Cowork and Creation Centre (Pueblo, USA), Herzfelde Community Garden (Herzfeld, Germany), The Ignorant Artschool andCooper Gallery at the University of Dundee, Lahore Biennale 03 and Al-Madam Community Center.
Fig. 10: Sancintya Mohini Simpson, kappal kari / kūli kari, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shafeek Nalakath Kareem
Fig. 10-11: RRD, Micromuseo, 2023. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Al Qasimia School, 2025. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
