Kaloki NyamaiSharjah Biennale 16: to carry06.02. - 15.06.2025
Al Hamriyah Studios, Al Hamriyah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

to carry a home
to carry a history
to carry a trade
to carry a wound
to carry equatorial heat
to carry resistance
to carry a library of redacted documents
to carry rupture
to carry Te Pō [the beginnings]
to carry change
to carry songs
to carry on
to carry land
to carry the language of the inner soul
to carry new formations
to carry the embrace of a river current
to carry sisterhood and communal connection
to carry the rays of a morning without fear

The Sharjah Biennial 16 titled, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.

The Biennial title, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?

Thus, ‘to carry’ proposes the Biennial as a collective wayfinding, a modality of sense-making and insistent looking—back, inwards and across—instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny. Sharjah Biennial 16 curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. As community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition, the projects collectively form a threshold space for experiments and collaborations, in which we compose divergent stories, understand failures and dark moments, and hold room for tenderness and rage.

As carriers of different processes and offerings, the curators have cultivated their projects together and apart, allowing room for listening, mutual support and the sharing of resources. Diverse curatorial methodologies—from residencies, workshops and collective production to writing, sonic experiences and expanded publications—are constantly present in the milieu of the Biennial, encouraging critical conversations. Sometimes, projects by different curators sit together in one venue to form a wild polyphony; at other times, they occupy an entire space to recite a story. Together, they form an evolving collection of narratives told from multiple perspectives, geographies and languages.

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 features works by more than 190 participants, including over 200 new commissions, which will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah.

Kaloki Nyamai’s assemblage paintings offer a navigation system of Akamba heritage – familial wisdom shared in the mother tongue – while also transmitting experiences of civic strife, political failures, police brutality and mass movements in Kenya and beyond. In large-scale canvases that expand on the character of painting, Nyamai layers newsprint, embeds found documents and inserts heavy stitching, relaying not only contexts of shared labour historical scars and contemporary wounds but also encounters in healing.Titled in Kikamba, Nyamai’s ancestral language, Nekusyanginya nivike I and II, TUKWATANE KIMWE, Kwata and TWETELA VAA NGINYA ENDEE (all 2024) unveil a coded relation between self and world, braiding facets of harmony and chaos through painterly mass, characters in flux, communal dreaming and the swell of aspiration. They present global locations where renewal and restorative actions can take shape, foregrounding hope in the face of political cataclysm and youth resistance. These works face forward in anticipation of a new dawn. (from the catalogue of Sharjah Biennial 16)