The 17th edition of the Sharjah Biennial will open in January 2027, led by two internationally recognised curators.
Angela Harutyunyan (left) and Paula Nascimento. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.
The Sharjah Art Foundation has announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, set to open in January 2027. Drawing from distinct yet complementary practices, the two curators will collaboratively shape a biennial grounded in critical reflection, experimental exhibition-making, and new articulations of contemporary reality.
“Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact,” said Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. “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.”
The curators will work closely to develop the biennial as a site of encounter and imagination, commissioning a wide range of artistic projects across Sharjah. Their approach will reflect an interest in how contemporary art can respond to – and reconfigure – social, temporal, and political conditions.
For Harutyunyan, Sharjah Biennial 17 offers a context to interrogate the deeper structures and uneven temporalities that shape the contemporary moment. “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,” she said. “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.”
Nascimento sees the biennial as an opportunity to experiment with curatorial form and to centre the imagination as a tool for collective transformation. “I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking and infrastructure in an expanded way,” she noted, “as well as exploring art’s capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations.”
About the Curators
Angela Harutyunyan (b. 1982, Gyumri, Armenia) is a Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her scholarly and curatorial work investigates post-Soviet art, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. She is a founding member of the Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities (Yerevan) and the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research and a founding editor of ARTMargins. Harutyunyan holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and has previously taught at the American University in Cairo and the American University of Beirut. She co-curated ‘This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time’ (2014–2015) and is the author of The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017).
Paula Nascimento (b. 1981, Luanda, Angola) is an architect and independent curator whose interdisciplinary practice engages the intersections of visual art, urbanism, geopolitics and education. Her work frequently addresses contemporary readings of historical themes in Africa and the Global South. Nascimento co-curated the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion in 2013 and has contributed to major exhibitions and biennials, including the Lubumbashi Biennale (2019, 2022), Rencontres de Bamako, Experimental Design and the Triennale di Milano. She is a curatorial advisor to Hangar – Centre for Artistic Research in Lisbon and serves on the acquisitions committee of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian.
Together, Harutyunyan and Nascimento promise to deliver a thoughtful and resonant edition of the Sharjah Biennial – one that is deeply engaged with the social, spatial and historical conditions shaping contemporary life and attuned to the artistic practices that seek to challenge, reimagine and reframe them.
For more information, please visit the Sharjah Art Foundation.
