2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial

Curatorial Assistant
Sharjah, UAE
11th November 2023 - 10th March 2024

Sandra Poulson, Dust as an Accidental Gift, 2023, installation view. More on the exhibit here. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic. Courtesy Sharjah Architecture Triennial

SHARJAH ARCHITECTURE TRIENNIAL: Curator: Tosin Oshinowo
Curatorial Assistant: Matthew Maganga
Curatorial Team: Myles Igwebuike, Sara Griffin, Julie Bonzon, Suha Hasan
Curatorial Advisory Board: Hoor Al Qasimi, Beatrice Galilee, Mariam Kamara, Paulo Tavares, Rahul Mehrotra, Yinka Shonibare CBE
Exhibition Design: Space Caviar
Triennial Partners: Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah Urban Planning Council, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah Directorate of Town Planning and Survey, Bee’ah Group

SELECTED PRESS:
The Architect’s Newspaper
e-flux
Wallpaper*
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LINKS:
Virtual exhibition tour
List of participants
Sharjah Architecture Triennial website

Curated by Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo and titled The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability, the second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial draws attention to the built environment’s design and technological innovations visible in the global South — solutions borne out of conditions of scarcity that are a result of working within the constraints of limited resources. Twenty-nine participants, from architectural practitioners to fashion designers, respond to this curatorial thematic through architecture, film, photography, painting, sculpture, and other mediums —positing gentler versions of modernity and poetically responding to the urgent ecological and political concerns of our times.

The exhibition was spread across six sites in the Emirate of Sharjah: a 1970s primary school, a 1980s vegetable market, a disused slaughterhouse, an incomplete mall, a vacant plot in an industrial zone, and in the abandonded village of Al Madam.

Curatorial responsibilities involved working with participants to develop their projects from concept to installation, editing exhibition guidebook and catalogue texts, and working closely with the curator on the curatorial direction of the edition, including the planning and curation of the talks and film programmes.

The triennial’s public programme spanned the cities of Sharjah, London, and Lagos, including film screenings which acted as a discursive expansion of the exhibition projects. Screened films included Into Dust (Orlando von Einsiedel, 2021), Nostalgia for the Future (Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar, 2017) and To Remain in the No Longer (Joyce Joumaa, 2023).

Participants: 51-1 Arquitectos (Peru); Adrian Pepe (Honduras/Lebanon); Al Borde (Ecuador); Art and Culture Development Foundation of the Republic of Uzbekistan (ACDF) (Uzbekistan); Asif Khan Studio (UK); Bubu Ogisi (Nigeria); BUZIGAHILL (Uganda); Cave_bureau (Kenya); Collab: Henry Glogau & Aleksander Kongshaug (Denmark/New Zealand); DAAR—Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (Italy/Palestine/Sweden); Dia Mrad (Lebanon); Formafantasma (Italy/Netherlands); Hive Earth (Ghana); Hunnarshala Foundation with Aabhat and AINA (India); Limbo Accra (Ghana); Miriam Hillawi Abraham (Ethiopia); Papa Omotayo & Eve Nnaji MOE+AA/ADD-apt (Nigeria); Natura Futura (Ecuador); Nifemi Marcus-Bello (Nigeria); Ola Uduku and Michael Collins (Nigeria/UK); Olalekan Jeyifous (USA/Nigeria); RUÍNA Architecture (Brazil); Sandra Poulson (UK/Angola); Sumaya Dabbagh (Saudi Arabia/UAE); Thao Nguyen Phan (Vietnam); Thomas Egoumenides (France/Tunisia); Wallmakers (India); Yara Sharif & Nasser Golzari (Palestine/UK); and Yussef Agbo-Ola (UK and Brazil)

SELECTED PROJECTS:

Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan’s multi-channel video installation First Rain, Brise Soleil explores Vietnam’s Mekong region through narrative and forklore, addressing urgent issues around industrialisation and ecology. More on the exhibit here. Photo: Haupt & Binder, Universes in Universe

Dia Mrad’s Power Shifts visually excavates the material expressions of Lebanon’s economic collapse through aerial imagery of his hometown Beirut. More on the exhibit here. Photo: Space Caviar

Spatial design practice LIMBO ACCRA occupied an unfinished mall in Sharjah — one of the Emirate’s largest buildings — providing an affective commentary on the prevalence of unfinished architecture in the Middle East. Exhibited photographs of various unfinished structures sites in West Africa further illustrate the global scale of this phenomenon.

Inhabiting a still-functioning 1980s slaughterhouse, Kenyan architects Cave_bureau presented the ninth edition of its travelling Anthropocene Museum, co-opting the structure with to curate a tour through the site critically interrogating consumerism and human-animal relationality through photographs, films and sculpture. More on the exhibit here. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic. Courtesy Sharjah Architecture Triennial

Also occupying the slaughterhouse, Beirut-based fibre artist Adrian Pepe’s installation Utility of Being: A Paradox of Proximity was composed of pneumatic tubes assembled from gathered pelts of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep — a byproduct of the slaughtering process — commenting on human-animal relationality and the tensions between survival and commerce. More on the exhibit here. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic. Courtesy Sharjah Architecture Triennial

DAAR - Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti presented Concrete Tent, exploring the notion of permanent temporariness that encapsulates the experiences of displaced populations in Palestine. The installation was sited in Al Madam — now a ‘ghost’ town — a settlemented created in the 1970s intended to ‘modernise’ nomadic tribes in the area. Photo: Edmund Sumner

The triennial’s film programme included Nostalgia for the Future (2017), a documentary on the failures of the project of modernity and its architecture in India, through the evocation of cinematic, archival footage from state-propaganda films and aural collective memory.

Matthew Maganga

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