Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global arts and culture schedule took a major hit in the spring of 2020.
Among the MENA region’s many casualties was the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting, an annual program of talks and discussions with international artists, curators and other cultural labourers.
The meetings are timed to correspond to the Sharjah Biennial of contemporary art and, in gap years, SAF’s springtime exhibition schedule. The Spring 2020 program of shows, which the virus outbreak interrupted, was particularly ambitious.
This week SAF announced that the 2020 March Meeting, originally scheduled for 21-23 March, has been moved to March 2021. Sharjah Biennial 15, scheduled to open in March 2021, will be bumped up to March, 2022.
Titled “Unravelling the Present,” March Meeting 2021 (MM 2021) will examine the history of the Sharjah Biennial and past March Meetings, assembling former Sharjah Biennial curators, participants and interlocutors as well as art historians and critics to discuss the biennial’s role as a catalyst for critical dialogue and transnational exchange.
“MM 2021 will explore the biennial’s evolution in its effort to break away from traditional modes of curation and exhibition, while engaging with the public by activating non-institutional spaces and moving to non-geographic models of representation,” SAF said in its press release. “Although MM 2021 will take place a year before Sharjah Biennial 15, titled ‘Thinking Historically in the Present.’ its theme was conceived as part of late curator Okwui Enwezor’s proposal for SB15.”
For details on March Meeting 2021 and Sharjah Biennial 15 in the coming months, see sharjahart.org.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
