Pratchaya Phinthong's "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand," composed of 10 granite solar panel sculptures, amid the sand dunes of a desert "ghost village" in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Tracking down the entirety of Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong's "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand," composed of 10 granite solar panel sculptures in Sharjah, is no simple feat. Rather than one swift trip to a single venue, the journey demands traversing the emirate and seeking out its most unassuming corners — outside a traditional Woman's House, inside a defunct clinic in an oasis town, within the city center's metro station and even amid the sand dunes of a desert "ghost village."
These scattered solar panels are fragments of a larger project off the United Arab Emirate's east coast, where Phinthong has constructed an underwater solar-powered nursery to help repopulate the Gulf's fragile coral reefs. Its foundation is built from coral brick slabs, directly sourced from the historic walls of Sharjah's heritage architecture, thus forging a link between the emirate's past and its ecological future.
Phinthong's expansive installation is just a glimpse into the sheer scale of this year's Sharjah Biennial. His piece is only one of over 200 new site-specific commissions for the biennale's 16th edition — and part of a staggering 650 works spread across museums, heritage houses, abandoned buildings and desert landscapes in the UAE's third-largest emirate.
Joe Namy's "Dub Plants" (2024-25) at Al Mureijah Square in Sharjah / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
In fact, to take it all in, the Sharjah Art Foundation, which organizes the biennial, recommends a three- to five-day visit.
Staged by five curators — Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz — the sprawling exhibition convenes under the theme, "to carry." This intentionally open-ended concept is what threads together a constellation of different ideas like divination, land, women's knowledge, technological intervention, ancestral memory and geopolitical power into one fluid, interconnected narrative.
Sharjah, cultural haven of Arab world
The ambitious scale of the Sharjah Biennial wasn't achieved overnight.
Sharjah, one of the seven states that make up the UAE, is often eclipsed by the pomp of its neighbors, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Yet, rather than building financial muscle through oil and trade, the emirate has cultivated a reputation as the federation's cultural haven — a role it has nurtured since the early 1980s.
Under the leadership of Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, an art patron and playwright, Sharjah established museums, launched an annual book fair and founded the country's first fine arts society. And in 1993, it introduced its own art biennale.
Aluaiy Kaumakan's "Vines in the Mountains" (2020) at the old government building of Old Al Diwan Al Amiri in Sharjah / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Jorge González Santos's "Jatibonicu (People of the Sacred High Waters)" (2024-25) at Al Mureijah Square in Sharjah / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Initially centered on Islamic and classical art, the biennial took a bold turn toward contemporary art in 2003, when the ruler's daughter, Hoor Al Qasimi, took the helm. Since then, the Gulf region's longest-running art event has evolved into a vital platform for amplifying less heralded voices of the non-Western majority.
That commitment was underscored in Al Qasimi's opening speech, Feb. 5: "I would like to ask everyone to keep in mind the people of Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo, Armenia and all other parts of the world where people are less fortunate than ourselves. We have to be in solidarity."
The densely packed Sharjah Biennial 16 continues that vision, further distancing itself from the singular West-centric canon. Among nearly 200 participating artists, Euro-American names are notably scarce, making way for decolonial practices that reframe art histories beyond dominant paradigms.
Installation view of Rully Shabara's "Khawagaka" (2012-present) at Calligraphy Square in Sharjah / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Some creatives achieve these counter-narratives by directly intervening in how history is constructed and presented.
In "Khawagaka," Indonesian artist Rully Shabara stages what appears to be a convincing archaeological museum display of the ancient Wusa civilization — except the entire civilization is a fictional invention. Every artifact on view — stone tablets, religious manuscripts, a language and clan system, archival photographs and a documentary film — has been meticulously fabricated, sometimes with the aid of generative AI. Yet, by mimicking institutional modes of display, the work unsettles their authority and exposes the mechanisms that govern the preservation of Indigenous knowledge.
"It shows how the (real-life) institution fabricates, manipulates, appropriates and exploits Indigenous cultures and values," Shabara told The Korea Times.
Salima Hakim's "Her Cabinet of Curiosities" (2024) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Similarly, Jakarta-based Salima Hakim uses embroidery to challenge archaeology's omissions of women. In "Her Cabinet of Curiosities," she crafts fabric replicas of fossilized human bones and scientific journals, while physically subverting each piece with intricate hand-stitched interventions.
"It's a way of telling the story of human evolution from the female perspective," she noted.
For others, songs and sounds become a gateway to retrieve lost fragments of history.
Lebanese artist Helene Kazan turns to song and poetic testimony to reclaim feminist histories surrounding the mysterious 1944 death of Syrian Egyptian icon Asmahan. In "Clear Night," Kazan sensorially performs Asmahan's final song within the archives of Oxford University, where recently declassified documents suggest the British government's involvement in the singer's untimely demise.
The work is part of the artist's decade-long investigation into the British and French "secret wars" and other lesser-chronicled colonial histories entwined with major figures in Lebanon and Egypt.
A scene from Helene Kazan's "Clear Night" (2025) / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation
Pakistani creative Risham Syed likewise employs song as a vessel for memory and resistance. In "Unn, Pani, Sut (Grain, Water, Truth)," she, along with her mother and daughter, sing a Sikh scripture against the backdrop of wheat fields. The installation, a meditation on the planetary food crisis spurred by wars and climate disasters, evokes "langar," the Sikh tradition of a communal kitchen that serves free meals to all, regardless of caste or creed.
Meanwhile, in Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri's "Gastromancer," two towering murex seashells appear to be engaged in a strange conversation. From within their cavernous interiors, visitors can hear a dialogue unfold, which recounts the shells' unintentional transformation from female to male. The conversation soon reveals that this curious biological metamorphosis was triggered by tributyltin (TBT), a red-hued biocide used in oil tanker paint to prevent barnacle growth — its toxic seepage into the ocean disrupting the species' natural futurity.
Monira Al Qadiri's "Gastromancer" (2023) at Al Mureijah Square in Sharjah / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation
Michael Parekowhai's "He Korero Purakau mo te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river" (2011) at Al Mureijah Square in Sharjah / Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation
And in conceptual artist Michael Parekowhai's "He Korero Purakau mo te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand river," a blazing red grand piano, ornately adorned with Maori carvings, transforms into a living artwork through musical performance. When played, the European instrument becomes a vessel, embodying the oral traditions and storytelling at the heart of Maori culture.
Art takes over Sharjah's hidden corners
Beyond the bustling city center, the biennale stretches deep into Sharjah's smaller towns and remote enclaves, placing art in a more vivid dialogue with fragments of local history. Even works that previously appeared elsewhere around the world take on fresh meaning as they settle into the emirate's unexpected spaces — from sand dunes to a former vegetable market alley.
In Sharjah's Al Madam lies a "ghost village," where only shifting sand dunes creep through the empty homes, erasing the last traces of human presence. Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
In Al Madam, an hour's drive from Sharjah's urban skyline, lies a "ghost village" slowly disappearing beneath desert sands. Once home to a semi-nomadic Bedouin tribe in the 1970s, the village was abandoned two decades later as its residents left for the UAE's fast-growing oil cities. Today, only shifting dunes creep through the empty homes, erasing the last traces of human presence.
It is in this hauntingly desolate landscape that New York-based sculptor Hugh Hayden has conjured a surreal "classroom." In "Brier Patch," twisted tree branches violently erupt from the vacant seats of 20 school desks.
"There is a mosque and houses here, but no school. So here are school seats to complete the neighborhood," the artist remarked with a smile.
Hugh Hayden's "Brier Patch" (2022) at Al Madam's "ghost village" / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Originally installed in the heart of the concrete jungle in Manhattan's Madison Square Park in 2022 as a commentary on disquieting inequity in the American education system, the piece takes on a strikingly different resonance in the Middle East. Against the vast sandy horizon, it speaks to cycles of abandonment and renewal — where wild nature reclaims empty school seats just as it does the deserted village itself.
"Are they growing or dying? That's left unclear," Hayden mused, noting that the desks will remain permanently, left to disintegrate — or evolve — over time.
Megan Cope's "Kinyingarra Guwinyanba" (2024) in Buhais Geological Park / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Australian Aboriginal artist Megan Cope's "Kinyingarra Guwinyanba" also finds new power in its Sharjah setting.
A "living" sculpture composed of 102 oyster rods, the piece stands in Buhais Geological Park — a barren, fossil-strewn landscape that was once submerged beneath an ancient sea. In this rugged terrain, where remnants of marine life from over 65 million years ago can be found, Cope's tribute to her oyster-cultivating Quandamooka ancestors becomes a powerful bridge between prehistoric oceans and the waters of the future.
"What's quite incredible at night," she said, "is how the mountain (in the background) looks like an ancestral whale, floating up on these poles."
Daniel Boyd's black vinyl polka-dotted installation engulfs the windowed facade of the Flying Saucer, transforming the star-shaped edifice into a miniature cosmos. Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Elsewhere, at the Flying Saucer — a space-age-inspired French restaurant and tobacconist in the 1970s — First Nations Australian artist Daniel Boyd has added a twist of his own to the building's peculiar past.
His black vinyl polka-dotted installation engulfs its windowed facade, transforming the star-shaped edifice into a miniature cosmos. An ethereal soundscape by Maori Scottish musician Mara TK accompanies the spectacle, weaving Indigenous relationships to the moon into an otherworldly sonic experience.
Palestinian collective Sakiya's "Capital Coup" (2024), staged within the arched corridors of Al Jubail's old vegetable market / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
Art illuminates other off-the-radar parts of the emirate — where Turkish composer Basak Günak's evocative laments echo through an abandoned date farm in the oasis town of Al Dhaid; Palestinian collective Sakiya reimagines the U.S. Capitol Building as a wire-mesh chicken coop within Al Jubail's old vegetable market; and Italian Libyan artist Adelita Husni-Bey transforms a defunct ice factory in Kalba into an immersive theater, confronting Libya's failing water supply infrastructures as a result of Italian colonization.
The Sharjah Biennale 16, which opened on Feb. 6, runs until June 15.