One element that runs through the Biennial is absence; in the form of death or the absence of a home, freedom or justice.

I'm taking it largely literally to concentrate on the former and on Walid Sadek’s piece, ‘On the Labour of Missing’, for example, which occupies the courtyard next to Slavs and Tartars in Heritage Area West. It is in a sense empty, evacuated, or represents that which is missing [explicitly] as well as a species of nothingness. From outside it offers a view of the sandy dust of the ground through the doorway, a quick look inside confirms an impression that ‘nothing’ is there, a step back to check on the label makes a form of joke by describing it as “mixed media”.

Step inside and inevitably you look harder at the context, the sky, the floor, the walls of coral. Just to the right of the entrance there is a plaque placed low and bearing what seems to be a symbol indicating waves, water, the sea. That’s it. Yet, from nothing comes everything, and although this is a characteristic move by Sadek, it resonates here partly, and precisely because of the context. It generates meanings impossible to anticipate like, for example, that it seems radically minimal in the context of such layered richness in the art, films, curatorial complexity and all the publications, let alone the wider context of the UAE and a region undergoing change. It represents a negative with which to tarry, a pause though which plenitude, even positivity pours.

Alfredo Jaar has installed a piece he’s shown before in a purpose built wooden structure ‘behind’ the Art Museum. ‘Lament of the Images’ is a stunning piece of work, combining perfect simplicity with powerful precision. There are two ways in, on the left side you enter a darkened space to find three short texts outlining ways in which power has rendered common property -satellite imagery, human rights, and other forms of information- absent. The Pentagon has bought all broadcasting rights to satellite images of the invasion of Afghanistan. Bill Gates has acquired 17 million historical photographs but is also burying them in order to preserve and multiply their reproductive value for his private company Corbis.

Wind through the installation, or enter at the right end, and you are confronted with more overt ‘nothing’; a large screen, the light from which has already bled around the constructed bends of the corridor -and which is completely blank. The screen shows nothing, or what nothing looks like, only, of course, there is no such thing, especially in so mediated a context as this, as nothing. Again, the absence of something signifies much. Jaar’s piece is the best of the work of his I've seen and one of the most perfectly executed works in the whole Biennial.

Then there is the absence contained by Khalid Hourani’s work here; ‘Every Palestinian Artist in Lebanon Is an Artist Until Proven Otherwise’. If you head to his space in the Bait al Serkal, you’ll find three images of graffiti related to his project there and a short explanation of it. The project is more interesting than this suggests, and he enjoys telling me that he has no idea where the four Palestinian refugees in Lebanon [who are “prohibited from practicing more than 70- professions, except, fortunately, art”] that he has brought with him to UAE are.

Instead, they’re free to do whatever they like, albeit while being filmed for future documentation and in order to have something to show in the space presumably. I like the idea of the piece much better than its execution. The idea is efficacious and I think better served by a sign describing the project in the space and zero documentation! That would underscore the pointedness of the work much better and activate the absence in its fuller potential.

One more piece that plays with the zone of absence is Rayyane Tabet [and Nida Ghouse]’s project which is an intervention in the place and time of the histories of Sharjah’s cricket stadium and how it has become the Afghan National team’s home stadium by dint of being stranded by a dust cloud. The intervention, a photograph of Afghani ground transferred to cover and protect the pitch here in Sharjah, is unveiled one exquisite evening at the stadium itself, famous to many as the neutral ground upon which Indian and Pakistan played historic matches for many years.

Tabet, who won the emerging artist award prize here, performs the full narrative with elegant precision before a 30-strong party is invited down to the bright green pitch to “chill”, which we do underneath a very nearly full moon. This is a clever and touching way of drawing presence from absence. Also the occasion for the re-telling of stories from the subcontinent about the tense results of the Sharjah Cup, especially in 1986 when Pakistan won the series with the last ball. Here place has become a space of common ground; neutral, only virtually national, characteristic perhaps, of its host culture’s aspirations?