Angela Harutyunuan and Paula Nascimento will curate Sharjah Biennial 17, which opens in January 2027, the Sharjah Art Foundation has announced.
‘Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities’, said Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of the Foundation.
Born in Gyumri, Armenia, Angela Harutyunyan is a professor and curator based in Berlin. After obtaining her PhD in art history and visual studies at the University of Manchester in 2009, Harutyunyan taught at the American University in Cairo until 2010 and at the American University of Beirut from 2011 to 2023. She is currently professor of contemporary art and theory at the Berlin University of the Arts as well as a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research. As one of the founding editors of ARTMargins, MIT Press, she has written extensively about post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory.
‘I am interested to explore the possibilities and limitations of the
biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity. I would like to explore the way in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity,’ she said in a statement.
Born and based in Luanda, Angola, Paula Nascimento is an architect and curator who works at the intersection of visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education, focusing particularly on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. She has developed projects and curated several exhibitions internationally including the Lubumbashi Biennale (as associate curator, 2019, 2022), Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography (2017), Triennale di Milano (2016), Experimenta Design (2015), the Angola Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Golden Lion, 2013).
Speaking on her appointment, Nascimento stated that ‘Biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making and spaces for gathering communities and social and physical transformation. I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between art making and infrastructure in an expanded way. I am interested in exploring art’s capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations.’
