Running from 6 February to 15 June 2025, SB16 will activate venues in Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid, Kalba and other locations in the Emirate of Sharjah, and bring together a diverse and broad range of perspectives.
Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz.
©️ Still from As if the world had no West (2024) by Mónica de Miranda
The Kwanza River – among the longest rivers in Angola that flows into the Atlantic Ocean – provided a point of entry for the Portuguese invasion in 1482. As the site of numerous battles of resistance and a natural force in its own right, the river prominently features as an symbol of independence – Angola’s currency Kwanza, is named after the river. Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars (2022) revisits this legacy of anti-colonial resistance in Angola, inviting the audience on a journey through revolutionary history and futures-in-the-making. The title is taken from O Caminho das Estrelas (Path to the Stars) a 1953 poem by Agostinho Neto, a freedom fighter and the former president of Angola. Over the course of a single day, from sunrise to sunset, viewers follow the path of a heroine as she navigates the River. She confronts various avatars of her past – and of Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal – along the way. This deeply poetic film traces lines of understanding about the meaning of stars. Miranda sheds light on the invisible and uncelebrated figures who took part in the struggle for Angolan independence – namely women – as well as the ecological resources they defended, especially the waterways that have borne witness to history, and continue to do so in the present.
Curated by Johanne Affricot and Eric Otieno Sumba.
Opening Wednesday, 17 July, 6:30 PM
For the first time, Mónica de Miranda’s work will be on display in Australia. The exhibition at Ames Yavus Gallery was curated by Ananya Mukhopadhyay.
MEMORY/MYTH is a program of films and video installations borne from distinct yet overlapping experiences of indigeneity, diaspora and the intersecting global legacies of colonialism. Through contemporary and historic works by a group of acclaimed international artists, Ames Yavuz presents a conversation between kindred spirits — authors united by their shared inheritance of landscapes and stories ravaged by the imperial project. The extensive lacunae in such histories are visited by these artists as sites for both mourning and discovery, while also being generative spaces for myth-making, fantasy and the curative contemplation of possible futures.
Highlight works in the program include Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, by celebrated photographer-filmmakers Donovan Wylie and Peter Mann, marking the first time the video installation will be shown outside of Ireland. Mónica de Miranda, a prominent Portuguese artist currently representing her nation at the Venice Biennale, will showcase The Island (A Ilha), commissioned by Autograph, London.
Image credits: Mónica de Miranda, The Island (A Ilha), Film Still, 2022.
“As if the world has no West” will premiere at Exposed Torino. The movie proposes the creation of new landscapes by investigating hidden, yet metaphysically present ecologies in Angola, deconstructing western understandings of memory, history, and land. The project enquires in the work of anthropologist Augusto Zita investigations in the Namibia desert, in which he devised a nature-oriented space/time system having light as a third dimension.
This work will bring forward this research , while deconstructing the understanding of land and looking at the land as a place of mutual care and liberation, As if the world had no west reveals nonwestern configurations of landscape.
EXPOSED is Turin’s new international festival of photography, which every year will bring temporary exhibitions, a specialised fair, educational activities, meetings, artistic commissions and off-site events centered around a theme to the Piedmontese capital in May. Promoted by the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT on behalf of Fondazione CRT and organised by Fondazione per la Cultura Torino, EXPOSED was created to strengthen the deep bond between Turin and photography.
Photographies of the african diaspora in Lisbon (1975-today). Temporary exhibition, curated by Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inocência Mata, bringing together photographs depicting the self-representation of the African diaspora in Portugal. These are “family albums” featuring images that Afro-Portuguese and African individuals have captured of themselves and their communities since 1975, when African countries gained independence from Portuguese colonization.
Image credits: Born and Die from the series Field Works, Mónica de Miranda
Greenhouse is a project developed by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala. The project is grounded in interconnections of practice, theory, and pedagogy, presenting the exhibition space as a place of experimentation and reflection. The curatorial and artistic team – including a visual artist, a choreographer and a researcher – proposes collective actions through pedagogy, sound and movement that reflect on the relationship between nature, ecology and politics. The project undertakes the deconstruction of the very epistemology of the exhibition space and the hierarchical binaries of curator and artist, thought and practice, human and nature. The garden becomes a space for continuous, dialogical creation between the artists and the public.
La Biennale di Venezia was established in 1895 and is today acknowledged as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions. La Biennale di Venezia stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends and organizes events in all its specific Departments: Art (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934) – alongside research and training activities.
The 14th iteration of Black Portraitures (BP) will take place over two days during the vernissage of the 60th Anniversary of the Venice Biennale. This year’s theme, Shifting Paradigms, will center thought leaders from Africa and the African Diaspora who are creating new models for the education, cultivation, exhibition, dissemination, and collection of art and images. The aim of the conference aligns well with the Venice Biennale’s theme, Foreigner’s Everywhere. Panelists will include a transnational list of artists, curators, art historians, writers, educators, collectors, gallerists, architects, and designers who use the experience of Blackness to facilitate new systems of knowledge within the field of art and storytelling. This version of BP will break new ground in numerous fields such as exhibition making, visual studies, art history, cultural criticism, the art market, urban planning, and Africana Studies.
PANEL:
Archives, Collections and Curating, April 21 from 9:00 – 10:15 AM This conversation will foreground the ways in which the processes of acquiring, maintaining and caring for cultural objects has subverted misconceptions about the lack of Black and
African history, and created new modes to engage with material, textual and visual culture. Liz Andrews is the moderator for this panel with Paul Ninson, LeRonn Brooks, Steven Booth, Alberta Whittle, and Mónica de Miranda as the panelists.
The sun does not rise in the north will be screened at The Art Explora Festival in Venice, Italy as part of their Museum Boat program. Art Explora is an itinerant festival that travels the world’s seas and oceans with its museum boat, offering innovative artistic and cultural experiences.
Moving across the shores between Ceuta (Spain) and Tangier, Morocco, a man and woman discover the present borders and past archaeologies of these lands that were once one and now exist separately.
©️ Still from The sun does not rise in the north by Mónica de Miranda, 2023
“The sun does not rise in the north” (2023) series
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North examines the complex diversity of personal and collective histories interconnected between the migrant and the diasporic experience in Europe. It is a continuous relational praxis that de Miranda depicts and deconstructs through counter-narratives of belonging, as well as on the (re)elaboration of memory in post-colonial discourses.
Malta’s first art biennale will be a visual festa, inspired by a process of formulating new narratives for the region, and a provocative rethink of global mindsets, emanating from the European continent’s deep south. Narratives that confront the horrendous stink of death by drowning; narratives that can defeat discourse fuelling fundamentalism and nationalism – a choral ‘hymn to the universe’, celebrating peace and harmony, defying war(s) with olive branches in hand, gleaned from the evergreen olive groves of the Mediterranean, blending with the sparkling whiteness of the seas that surround them: a provocative artistic initiative inviting a rethink of global mindsets about art and society, emanating from the deep south of the European continent.
Curated by Elisa Carollo, Emma Mattei together with artistic director Sofia Baldi Pighi and set designer Nigel Baldacchino.
“THE SUN DOES NOT RISE IN THE NORTH” (2023)
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North examines the complex diversity of personal and collective histories interconnected between the migrant and the diasporic experience in Europe. It is a continuous relational praxis that de Miranda depicts and deconstructs through counter-narratives of belonging, as well as on the (re)elaboration of memory in post-colonial discourses.” Fragment of the exhibition text, The Sun Does Not Rise in the North at Sabrina Amrani gallery.
ARCOmadrid is Spain’s International Contemporary Art Fair which, since its creation, has been one of the main contemporary art market platforms. In 2024, it will hold its 43rd edition with the Caribbean at its core. The programme curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann Morera, ‘The shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Caribbean’, will hinge on the art scenes of the lands connected by this sea.