This year’s March Meeting (MM), ‘Active Forms’, formed the framework for six concurrent exhibitions of modern and contemporary Arab art organised by the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF). The theme was prominently signposted, yet its meaning was not directly addressed in MM panels or the exhibitions’ curatorial statements—only loosely referred to in the MM guide as ‘acts of organizing’ considered fundamental to artistic and cultural production.1 While organising is a form of action and integral to the production of art and culture, is it distinctly an active form? For an artist, curator or art historian, the latter evokes ideas of dynamic aesthetics, such as oppositional relationships within media that create a sense of friction or movement. Viewed via this broader lens, SAF’s spring exhibitions offered multiple ways to consider art’s traction through formal relationships, as well as its purchase with wider cultural spheres.
A similar quest for purchase has been high on SAF’s agenda since its formal establishment in 2009. To date, the foundation has built a myriad of arts infrastructure that includes the Sharjah Biennale (est. 1993), the annual March Meeting (est. 2008), a collection, outdoor cinema, and as of 2013, six white cube gallery spaces. The complex occupies much of Sharjah’s old city, whose buildings and walls have been restored and integrated into the foundation’s offices and venues (Bait Al Serkal, the former nineteenth-century home of the British Commissioner for the Arabian Gulf, for instance, was the location of a major survey of Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian, co-curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev). Navigating the Foundation’s labyrinthine locale while visiting the exhibitions was an architecturally awakening experience, where tripping over doorsills—a characteristic of Middle Eastern architecture—became a recurring riff.
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