Curated by Yuko Hasegawa

Almost two years have passed since the Sharjah Biennial experienced a curatorial and organizational meltdown. The director, Jack Persekian, was fired; perhaps more consequentially, an installation by the Algerian artist Mustapha Benfodil was abruptly dismantled and taken away. Benfodil’s piece had been placed in a courtyard, and the very public nature of that space hastened the work’s undoing. Now, in a clever inversion of fates, the courtyard itself is the concept of the forthcoming edition. Curator Yuko Hasegawa has commissioned work from artists such as Saâdane Afif, Francis Alÿs, Runa Islam, Ernesto Neto, Gabriel Orozco, and Wael Shawky. Drawing on the writings of the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta and the history of the tenth-century fortress the Alhambra, among other sources, she has also enlisted architects (and artists working as architects) such as SANAA, Superflex, and Studio Mumbai to consider the courtyard anew—as a metaphor, a typology, and a site of (controlled) experimentation and exchange.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie