Sharjah Art Foundation invites visitors for unique experiences

If you are looking to share a special experience with friends and family in Sharjah’s historic areas, Sharjah Art Foundation has two major exhibitions as well as the permanent installation Rain Room Sharjah (2012) that put viewers at the centre of the art.

A noteworthy exhibition that closes at the end of this month is The Other Side of Silence. This is the first mid-career survey of London-based Syrian-Armenian artist Hrair Sarkissian, who is considered one of the foremost conceptual photographers of our time.

The life-sized photographs, videos and installations in this exhibition take audiences on an expansive journey through the hallowed squares of Aleppo, Latakia and Damascus, across the skies above Palmyra and over the snow-covered post-industrial landscapes of modern day Armenia.

The Other Side of Silence also brings together two major new commissions by the artist and more than a dozen of his most significant bodies of work from the past 15 years.

Sarkissan has long worked with analogue photography, using a large-format camera to produce life-sized photographs — a medium that he noted enables the thrill and experience that 'chance' plays in capturing time in an age that is over-saturated with digital cameras and hyper-saturated image culture.

Sarkissian's The Other Side of Silence is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and the Bonnefanten, Maastricht. The exhibition is curated by Dr Omar Kholeif, Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation; Dr Theodor Ringborg, Artistic Director, Bonniers Konsthall; and Stijn Huijts, Artistic Director, the Bonnefanten.

After its presentation at SAF, the exhibition travels to Bonniers Konsthall, where it will be on view from April 26 to June 19, then to the Bonnefanten Museum, where it will be on view from November 17 to May 14.

Another noteworthy exhibition on view through February 5 is The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis. This exhibition brings together a selection of key works by The Otolith Group, the London-based art collective consisting of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun.

The title of the exhibition references the African-American science fiction novelist Octavia Butler’s legendary Xenogenesis trilogy. Butler’s ideas inform Eshun and Sagar’s longstanding preoccupation with the promise and threat of the idea of ‘alien becoming’, or ‘becoming alien’.