Body Quotidian initiates a dialogue between recent sculptures, photographs and paintings by artists Laila Majid and Inaam Zafar. Though their immediate concerns may vary, both artists share a preference for metaphor. Majid and Zafar’s works remind us that our bodies persist—bound by skin and hair, sustained as vessels of flesh and blood—even as contemporary technologies increasingly warp and reshape our perceptions of youth, truth and beauty.

Our present is troubled by what remains of unlived pasts, of the defeated yet undead projects of a modernity premised on universal emancipation. Rather than passive and dormant, these remainders continue to animate the present with their restive rhythms, shaping the politics of time and space. Histories resurface and endure, not as pure recurrence but as residues and morphed processes actively informing the now. Grounded in this common theme, Sharjah Biennial 17: What remains, sits restive brings together two different approaches, each articulated by one of the two curators: Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento.

While Jorge Tacla was only an adolescent during the 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende, the upheaval left an irrevocable mark on his politics and practice. A third-generation Chilean of Palestinian and Syrian descent, the artist has been working between Santiago and New York since 1981, unravelling the intricate geopolitical causalities binding Latin America, West Asia and the United States.

Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection brings together selections that offer different perspectives on our association with and relationship to land, water and homeland.