Sharjah Biennial Announces 109 Artists For 2027 Edition

The Sharjah Art Foundation has set the frame for the 17th Sharjah Biennial, and the title alone suggests a show interested less in closure than in persistence. Titled“What remains, sits restive,” the biennial will run from January 21 to June 13, 2027, across Sharjah City, Al Dhaid, Khorfakkan, and the Kalba Ice Factory, with 109 artists taking part.

The edition is co-curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento, who are approaching the biennial through two related but distinct lines of inquiry. The foundation says the project will center on unrealized social projects and on the ways the past continues to animate the present, not as simple repetition but as something altered, residual, and still active.

Harutyunyan, a professor of contemporary art and theory at the Berlin University of the Arts and a founding editor of ARTMargins, will work with 55 participants on“the various afterlives of socialist modernity,” especially where those histories intersect with anti-colonial struggles and modernization. Nascimento, an architect based in Luanda and a former associate curator of the Lubumbashi Biennial, will guide 54 artists in a parallel inquiry into infrastructure as a site where memory, moment, and place meet.

The artist list reflects that split while also widening the biennial's geographic reach. Participants come from Eastern Europe, Southwest Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and the roster includes historical and contemporary practices. Among the confirmed names are Hassan Khan, Ibrahim Mahama, Oscar Murillo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Iman Issa, and Grada Kilomba.

The full list is extensive, but the curatorial structure already signals the shape of the exhibition: one that treats history as unfinished material rather than settled record. In Sharjah, that approach has become one of the biennial's defining strengths, and the 2027 edition appears set to extend it across both the city and its outlying sites.

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