Skip to main content

Mapping Out A New Cultural Discourse

Sharjah Biennial 

Romain Maitra
Eyeline 78/79
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

I embarked in a ship… and reached the township of Sarja, which is inhabited by Yemenite merchants. They are generous and open-handed, supply food to travellers and assist pilgrims, transporting them in their ships and providing for them from their own funds. 

Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-541

 

In this significant passage from the descriptions of Sharjah by the legendary historian-traveller Battuta we get a semblance of the generosity of his hosts. In fact, during Battuta’s extensive travels from China in the East to the Sahara Desert in the West and over to the northern margins of Africa, he was known to have witnessed a generous exchange of information and knowledge going on concurrently with the wide network of trade across the region. Further, his accounts reveal that a significant venue in which such generous exchange took place was the many courtyards.

In the 11th edition of the Sharjah Biennial this year, the Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa shaped her curatorial design specifically around the nostalgic significance of Sharjah’s historic courtyards, where aspects of public and private lives interwove and the outer world and the inner world helped shape the ‘mappings’ of knowledge and culture. The epistemological basis of Hasegawa’s curatorial theme, titled ‘Re:emerge – Towards a New Cultural Cartography’ was her position away from the dominant Eurocentric notion of defining development and modernity—a paradigm shift that was inspired significantly by Andre Gunder Frank’s seminal tome ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age,2 in which the author challenged the Eurocentric historiography from which much of our received modern social theory has been derived. Like Gunder Frank’s renewed mapping of the world economy between 1400... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Carsten Höller, Random Rolling Cylinder, 2013

Carsten Höller, Random Rolling Cylinder, 2013. Detail. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. 

SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), Bubble, 2013

SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), Bubble, 2013. Installation view. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.