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.

Comprising 165 photographs and archival documents from the collection of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Federal Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Sharjah, this exhibition serves as a starting point for research into how photography translates and interprets history.

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.