Reflections from March Meeting Sharjah Biennial 16

to carry songs: a diary 

      and thoughts 

            about language 

                  in fragments 

: reflections from March Meeting 2025: Sharjah Biennial 16 

1.

Between 4 February and 10 March 2025, I went to Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates twice for this sixteenth iteration of the Biennial. Once was for the opening week in early February and then again later for the annual March Meeting. In this period, I witnessed a momentous and revealing shift in the Australian art scene within which this specific diary is situated. 

During my first visit I was at the Flying Saucer, a distinctive brutalist building constructed in 1978 and architecturally designed to create a unique sonic space where visitors standing in the centre of the building can hear themselves. This space hosted paintings and a site specific architectural intervention by Kudjla Gangalu artist Daniel Boyd alongside a new commissioned sonic work Nga Mata o Hina by Maori-Scottish artist Mara TK. TK’s work itself responds to Boyd’s Untitled (25° 21' 11.1" N 55° 24' 43.9" E) and maps Indigenous relationships to the Moon.

This turned out to be the same day I found out that Lebanese-Australian multi-disciplinary artist Khaled Sabsabi had been announced to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. It is considered one of the hugest achievements for an artist to present their work in the Venice Biennale. Just last year Australia’s pavilion was the winner of the Golden Lion Award with an installation from Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose. I remember speaking to another Naarm-based artist Brian Martin that very morning under the sonicscape orchestrated by Mark TK and amplified by the saucer while Boyd’s cut outs mapped on to the building with his specific mark-making style creating an interplay of shadow and light. We had shared delight of this news, and in my case, still a shock and disbelief. Enclosed in this listening space, connecting and reweaving orbits, planets and movements. I felt hopeful of this ground-shift, even if my own Muslim migrant identity would find it hard to feel that this was real.

Was it a foreboding feeling and a premonition about those forces in this world that erase voices and deny them agency that does not allow me to feel hope?

The day I arrived back from Sharjah to Australia, the first time, I woke up to the news that Khaled Sabsabi and his curator, Michael Dagostino, had been disinvited from representing Australia in the 2026 Venice Biennale. In the time that I had moved through two hemispheric crossings, carrying multiple feelings (as I always do) through borders, oceans and climates, always an emotional moment of risk and surveillance, whilst carrying a Pakistani passport. In this movement, I felt that the ground had opened up and closed again. 

If one were to propose a Biennial opening time as one of suspended time, of that liminal space where there is socialisation, and euphoria, and lots and lots of connecting and reconnecting and perhaps a time between waking and dreaming, then perhaps we can imagine that the news of Sabsabi’s appointment and the conversation with Brian was but a dream.

To be back in Sharjah for the March Meeting a month later, is perhaps a reprieve and a desire to overturn that reality, but also to imagine a new dream. To come back to Sharjah was to re-situate myself into a geography that feels much more grounded in truth and reality – closer to my own kin and community – given that Sharjah is but a ninety minute flight from my home city in Karachi. In making hemispheric crossings, I was also perhaps hoping to re-order the world in which Sabsabi was still representing Australia at the next Venice Biennale and to find language for all that it feels difficult to say.

2.

While the Sharjah Biennial itself is spread out over numerous venues in the Emirate of Sharjah, March Meeting this year took place at Al Qasimiyah School, a repurposed site of a decommissioned school from the 1970s. Since 2008, March Meeting has been an annual gathering bringing together writers, curators and thinkers from the region to Sharjah. Over time, it has become a crossing point of ideas and community, especially from connected geographies of the Majority World, and as someone coming from Karachi, where much of the world feels inaccessible, but Sharjah is just a ninety minute flight away, a place where discourse is possible with community one feels kinship with. While March Meeting has been going on for seventeen years, this year it had a different temporal framework due to Ramadan – which meant it ran from 9pm to 1am on most days, in between that space of fasting – again a time of waking and dreaming. 

On the first day we arrived early, the echoes and reverberations around me were of the Taraweeh prayers, moving across the cityscape, a thirty day reading of the Quran that happens in the month of Ramadan. What will I tell you about these sacred verses and songs, recited daily from the Quran and what truths they hold for some of us who think through such things? What will I tell you about my feelings of resonances to these, in this time of genocide, where the only truth for me is to turn to pages of this scripture in search of goodness and pathways to stay steadfast and justice. While those in power in this worldly realm use words that feel void of meaning, indeed manipulate words to use them against us, language that then feels hollow, songs that are distorted, it is only the voices of these verses, echoing across the geography of Sharjah and in my heart, that gave me a way to continue. 

3.

Situated in the courtyard space of Al Qasimiyah itself were suspended textile works, an installation Maat by the Emirati artist Hashel Al Lamki acknowledging the spirits of those students who had studied in this school. Amal Khalaf, one of the five curators of the Biennial, spoke about this year’s gathering as one of learning and exchange. With Hashel, they both discussed the ritual of throwing cowrie shells and seeking guidance from them, as a jumping off point, and as part of ancestral memory and practice, coming from their shared communities in the Gulf. Hashel’s work is collaboratively developed, with artisans and students, and the conversation turned to what it may mean to keep ideas of risk and surprise open especially when thinking of these Indigenous knowledge – such as the practice of throwing cowrie shells and allowing intuition to guide us. What may we think about artistic ways of engaging with these pasts and how can collaboration guide these systems?

4. 

I was drawn to the project Only Sounds that Tremble through Us, an immersive deep listening space, and also a vinyl work, part of an ongoing installation by the collaborative Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Rhounne Rahme, ‘that began with a collection of online recordings, mostly of performances from Palestine, Iraq and Syria’.[1] This project was part of an invited section curated by Bilna’es, an ‘disciplinary platform invested in generating new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work.’[2] As someone who has a proximity to Arabic language and script through being able to read it (but not able to understand it), my response was to think of these songs that tremble through us as invoking shared otherwise worldings, but I also kept thinking of the acute power of the sonic itself. 

When living in a world, where words fail us, where words are devoid of meaning, where language is abstracted, where human rights violations are called ‘professional failure’, it seems one can sometimes only seek refuge only in sound that we may not fully able to understand, but which has emotions that can carry us through. Only Sounds that Tremble through Us felt like this resistant project that refused erasure. 

5.

Next door to this project were works by the Hawajri family from Gaza; Dina Mattar and Mohammed Hawajari and their three children. How does one eloquently describe this archive of art, stories, memories, grief and sadness but also joy carried by a family facing genocide? A collective family offering, with dense, rich paintings by the parents, examining journeys of displacement, stories of home and the strength of collective resistance, a video by the eldest son showing their journey of loss and displacement over six months, which included saving their possessions, a series of puppets by their other son, and drawings by the youngest daughter of dreams of homes and gardens, was and will, for me, remain the most moving and urgent part of the Biennial.

Dina Matter and Mohammed Hawajari spoke at the March Meeting about their journey, about their work, and about carrying this art in a brief moment of reprieve. They spoke about how art can be considered a luxury, and indeed it was not their priority but when they went to recover their possessions from their home, which had not yet been bombed, they also recognised that this was art they had made over twenty years, and they chose not to eliminate their culture or their life. 

When I think about the theme of the sixteenth Biennial, ‘to carry’, it is here that the phrase has the heaviest weight and the most direct meaning – an actual crossing, from a threshold of living to extinction. In this crossing, I was overcome with the generosity of how the Hawajari family chose to share their story. All I could keep thinking and holding through this fearless conversation was about how little the here and now matters, in so many ways, and how steadfast we must be in our pursuit for justice. 

6. 

We were offered a sonic devotion by Berlin-based music maker houaïda titled The Love of Spirits Sounds Worlds. 

How do I describe sound to you?

the sonic wave crashing at the back / a continuous movement, even at the point of rupture / a wave moving and crashing / a carrying of memory, even at the border that was imposed / a wave and a sound moving, even at the movement of the world’s end / a wave moving and a wave crashing at the ends of the world

a sonic movement that takes us through. Will we listen?

a movement, harkening back to other ways of moving

How can the sound heal you? How can it repair rupture? 

As the curator Natasha Ginwala closed this day by stating – perhaps we think of this as ‘an aquatic worlding of a home from a diasporic perspective, inviting us to dreamwalk through aqueous unpredictable worlds // to carry songs – multitudinal life worlds and surrendering into fluidity – inviting connection in hopeful lament and defy rigid linguistic boundaries’. 

Or in the words of Ocean Vuong ‘you are a participant in the future of language’, something I am trying to do in this text.[3]

7. 

On Day 2, the writers and translators Meena Kandasamy and Athena Farrokhzad in their conversation titled Desiring Beings, Dissident Chorus, spoke about the need to grieve but also about translation and the limitation of language. Kandasamy spoke about how the first hijack undertaken by neoliberal capitalism has been language itself. We must consider the language those in power use – such as neutralise (for killing people) or land grab (for development). 

How then can we think about the possibilities of language here? How does language get re-deployed and utilised? As Kandasamy explained that in the 1980s, before the coming of neoliberal capitalism, writers were not divorced from politics, and I seek solace in her words that ‘I cannot imagine being a writer, and not being inside a struggle’.[4]

8. 

Indigenous storytelling and thinking from diverse and plural histories was an important thread throughout the Biennial and therefore through the March Meetings. So many artists, such as Raven Chacon, spoke about carrying songs, about making scores, about making notations for friends, for loved ones and for partners. There were discussions around Indigenous futurism, around remaking constitutions and nation states, as discussed by Subash Thebe Limbu and Luke Willis Thompson, where otherwise ways of thinking about our pasts and futures, captured as we are within the violent imaginary of the nation (and therefore our dreams are tied to them). 

I found myself thinking about the impossibility of being able to perhaps escape the language that we are within – that language is a structure that both binds us but also allows for remaking of liberation. How do our desires to liberate get connected to those desires that also trap us?

9.  

Upstairs in one of the school rooms was the archive of dancer and choreographer Chandralekha, a seminal figure in Indian and South Asian cultural history. Photographs, writings, and videos of her performances were gently and thoughtfully presented, the exhibition design by Diogo Passarinho itself a choreography paying homage to her life and work. Her work and archive is not easily accessible to me, both physically, but also conceptually, due to Partition, but also to Islamisation in Pakistan, a time when traditional dance forms were frowned upon and therefore sidelined. These histories have now become inaccessible to me. Here I thought of dancer Sheema Kirmani who in Pakistan has kept the tradition of kathak alive, even under an Islamist dictatorship. 

Not knowing her language of dance, I leaned into it thinking of the opacity of language and surrendering to them to think about new ways of resistance. Through Chandralekha, we think of the making of craft, of resistance through movement, as someone who ‘harnessed tension, slowness, elasticity and the breath cycle as a means of muscular and cosmic time keeping’.[5]

As the events of the last few days have reminded me, even more acutely, Partition has long haunted South Asia and its diaspora. I think of the songs that were taken away from us in the making of borders, as I turn back to the courtyard where Hashel Al Lamki’s Maat hangs. I witness familiar songs in languages known and unknown – as a possibility of repair. March Meetings concluded with Chaar Yaar, a quartet of four singers from present day India who share four different religious identities – Sikh, Muslim, Christian and Hindu. 

As they performed songs that evoked ancestral connections of an undivided time, I felt washed away, in company of kin and friends, old and new, and reminded of the fact that Sharjah is such a strongly South Asian city and that perhaps it is through these songs, and as gratitude to these ancestors, I can also rest my grieving, broken heart in this world and forgive myself for the language I can and cannot say. 

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistani-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity. They are currently a PhD Candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University

Aziz Sohail’s trip to Sharjah Biennial 16 and March Meeting was supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation.

[1]  Amal Khalaf, Guidebook: Sharjah Biennale 16, Sharjah Art Foundation. p. 110.

[2] Basel Abbas and Rhounne Rahme and Amal Khalaf, Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us, wall text, Sharjah Biennale 2025.

[3] Ocean Vuong and Krista Tippett, ‘On Being: A Life Worthy of Our Breath’, On Being, 30 April 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/ocean-vuong-a-life-worthy-of-our-breath-2022/ (accessed 14 May 2025).

[4] Meena Kandasamy, Desiring Beings, Dissident Chorus, March Meeting Sharjah Biennale, 2025.

[5] Natasha Ginwala, The Ancestral Well: Pulse to Terrain, wall text Sharjah Biennale, 2025.