Opening in January 2027, the Sharjah Biennial 17 unfolds across multiple sites in the emirate under the title What remains, sits restive, bringing together 109 participants in an exploration of how unresolved histories continue to shape contemporary experience. The edition runs from 21 January to 13 June 2027 and is co curated by Paula Nascimento and Angela Harutyunyan.

Nascimento’s curatorial framework sits at the core of this edition, foregrounding infrastructure not simply as a physical condition but as a conceptual lens through which to read space, memory and power. Her selection of 54 participants brings together practices that consider how cultural expression is shaped within systems that are simultaneously visible and obscured. Across installations and site responsive works, infrastructure is treated as a carrier of historical residue, where processes of erasure and persistence are negotiated rather than resolved.

Harutyunyan’s parallel strand turns towards the afterlives of socialist modernity, particularly in contexts marked by anti colonial struggle and uneven trajectories of modernisation. Her selection of 55 artists examines whether and how emancipatory histories remain active within contemporary conditions, despite fragmentation and displacement.

Together, these two curatorial approaches position the Biennial as a space in which history is neither fixed nor completed. Instead, What remains, sits restive frames the present as a site where multiple temporalities intersect, and where the legacies of past projects continue to surface in new and unstable forms.

Across exhibitions, installations and site responsive commissions, Sharjah becomes a site of sustained reflection on how time, memory and space are produced and contested. The Biennial extends beyond exhibition making into a broader inquiry into how artistic practice can articulate the conditions through which histories remain active in the present.