Sharjah Art Foundation has announced the title, curatorial framework and full participant list for Sharjah Biennial 17: What remains, sits restive. Running from 21 January to 13 June 2027, the edition will bring together 109 participants across Sharjah City, Al Dhaid, Khorfakkan, Kalba and other sites throughout the emirate, with an opening week from 21 to 24 January.

The biennial is co-curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, two figures whose practices are rooted in distinct but converging intellectual traditions. Their shared curatorial premise centres on what is left behind by unfinished histories: the residues of emancipatory projects, the slow erosion of cultural memory, and the ways the past continues to press on the present not as straightforward repetition but as active, morphed force.

Harutyunyan, Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts and a founding editor of ARTMargins, brings together 55 participants to examine the afterlives of socialist modernity as seen from the margins of modernisation and anti-colonial struggle. Her section asks whether art can still activate what remains of emancipatory politics under late capitalism.

Nascimento, an architect and independent curator based in Luanda and a former associate curator of the Lubumbashi Biennial, works with 54 participants to explore infrastructure as both method and metaphor. Her contribution examines how space, place and memory intersect in ways both tangible and intangible, proposing new vocabularies for navigating the cultural silencing and slow violence that have shaped the present.

The participant roster is notably international in scope, drawing artists from across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Among those confirmed are Anri Sala, Hassan Khan, Ibrahim Mahama, Grada Kilomba, Oscar Murillo, Kapwani Kiwanga and Iman Issa, alongside a significant number of lesser-exhibited and emerging voices.

Founded in 2009 and presenting the Sharjah Biennial since 1993, Sharjah Art Foundation operates year-round across the emirate, with all exhibitions free and open to the public. Hoor Al Qasimi serves as President and Director.

Sharjah Biennial 17: What remains, sits restive opens 21 January 2027.