Angela Harutyunyan, Paula Nascimento are Sharjah Biennial 17 curators: SAF

Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, opening January 2027.

- Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda, Angola.

"Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact," said Hoor Al Qasimi, SAF President and Director. "Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories. Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities."

Working in close collaboration, the mandate for the curators is to shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah emirate. "The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me," said Harutyunyan. "I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity."