“There is a lot of thinking about the traditions of land, soil and water in Palestine that intersect with our methods for resistance – the ways we choose to be fighters, artists, poets and workers in the face of genocide and generalised oppression,” asserted sound artist Bint Mbareh during her talk at the inaugural edition of April Acts. “In terms of the borders that frame every Palestinian body, whether manifested in physical or bureaucratic forms, it is water bodies that tell these borders that they don’t exist. And we can use our tears as a good starting point for that idea. Because when we cry, piss, sweat, we become part of the water cycle, and we send off our bodies into a world that cannot be bound by the borders we live in.”

These beautiful words, alongside Mbareh’s musical performance – looping her own voice with water-summoning songs and field recordings to create an emotive call and response – were an apt jump off point for April Acts, a weekend of dialogues and performances engaging with the curatorial intentions of Sharjah Biennial 16 (SB16) and the power of art to communicate a “collective wayfinding” through the troubled times we live in today.

The current edition of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s renowned biennial extends its reach across the Gulf region and the Global South with its theme ‘to carry’, which asks how we hold, nurture and give forward what is most precious to us, whether that’s a home, a knowledge, a land or a soul. Co-curators Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz took this opportunity to nurture myriad commissions and experimentations from around 200 artists, thinkers, archives and collectives, culminating in over 650 works situated in 17 sites around the emirate.

And with April Acts, this open-armed project has turned the dial even more. “April Acts creates a space for what refuses to be forgotten, histories that insist, heritage that shapes us, urgencies that demand response,” asserts Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Art Foundation president and director. “The programme asks, how do we stay present in the midst of rupture and repair? What type of gestures, tools and languages – passed down or invented – help us live otherwise? How can we make room for what is unfinished or still becoming?”

As with Mbareh’s work, one enduring thread of SB16 and April Acts looked to the water to think about maritime histories, oceanic crossings and climate change as well as mythologies of the seas. Stéphanie Comilang’s film installation ‘Search for Life II’ (2025) examines pearl production between the Arabian Gulf, the Philippines and China. An object of desire and currency, we experience the pearl as it travels from the hands of migratory divers to the necks of all-singing, all-dancing influencers. Meanwhile Julianknxx’s poetic film installation ‘Daughters at the Rim of the Silver Seas’ (2025) uses dance as a language that communicates across the Black diaspora from the shores of France to those of Sierra Leone and Rwanda, in the embrace of choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza. And M’hammed Kilito’s photographic series ‘Kafila’ (2024-2024) delves into the precarious future of the Figuig oasis in Morocco – a life source, social spot and spiritual centre under threat from desertification.

Amal Khalaf’s fluid approach to her curation was to share with artists the story of her grandmother who was a lamenter in Bahrain. “As a young girl, I remember how she would help women to process pain and rage. And I would sit at the back of the room and learn how to throw shells, which is a form of divination for many coastal communities,” she explains. “When we think of those lament spaces in this moment of loss and grief in the world, how do artists hold and process that? How do we learn together and imagine together?”

These questions were most urgent for artists witnessing devastating loss themselves, making resource distribution an immediate priority. Khalaf gives the example of Tuareg-French researcher Maïa Tellit Hawad whose piece ‘Tenelé’ (2025) addresses the extractivist nature of uranium mining in the Aïr Desert. “Maïa took her commissioning budget and gave it to 42 women from the Tuareg Confederation to create textile works mapping where they are from. Then there were floods caused by the mining so they lost all of their livestock and that very place they were mapping, so those budgets went to survival. Maïa couldn’t access the women any more so her cousin went across the valley to pick up cloths, then took the one flight a week from Niger to Casablanca to deliver them to her. This shows how we can work in collective ways to tell the story of many people.”

This chimes with indigenous Australian artist Megan Cope, who used oyster shells in the creation of two formidable sculptures – ‘Kinyingaara Poles’ (2024) situated in a rocky valley that was once a seabed, and ‘Whispers Midden’ (2024) set against the coral walls of Al Mureijah Square – to address the destruction of Quandamooka aquaculture due to dredging and mining. During her April Acts talk with Megan Tamati-Quennell, Cope said, “This species is a super food that has long kept us working as a community but is now scarce. These ways of being together were embodied in the making of these works. They amplify the voices of the land and sea and care for Country.”

Collective making as curatorial care was central to Alia Swastika’s methodology, which highlighted the wisdoms produced and passed on by women, their intimate gestures and symbols creating constellations of action and discourse. “I was inspired by Womanifesto – a feminist artist exchange founded in Thailand in 1997 – to create a space for gathering for artists from around the world to open conversations across social groups and artistic practices,” Swastika says. Womanifesto’s latest enactment ‘WeMend’ (2023-ongoing) landed in Sharjah where it facilitated solidarities through the stitching of a patchwork shelter. “A group of women from Al Nahda contributed a beautiful fabric but initially declined our invitation to the SB16 opening because they didn’t usually show themselves in public. Yet in the end, they attended because they loved the project so much. That was special for me.”

Another magic moment came during April Acts when the son of Palestinian artist Mohammed Al Hawajri took part in a publishing workshop. Al Hawajri and fellow artist Dina Mattar originally arrived in Sharjah with their families having fled the Al Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, bringing with them as many artworks from the Eltiqa Group as they could carry. At the Al Qasimiyah School, these rescued works are exhibited alongside new pieces created locally. “For me, this biennial goes beyond creating objects, it offers peer-to-peer emotional support and human connection,” Swastika adds.

These reflections are only a fraction of the overwhelming and open-ended propositions afforded by SB16 and April Acts. As you move through each show location – ranging from lofty white cubes to abandoned vegetable markets, from former medical facilities to retro-futurist architectural wonders – the experience is profound as you learn and you listen and wonder. At one turn you find yourself at Calligraphy Square engrossed in Monica de Miranda’s masterful video and photography installation ‘As If the World Has No West’ (2024). Shot in the Namib Desert, it draws on Bantu cosmology and the works of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho to confront the remnants of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and build new utopias. Then at the next turn, you wander into the remote sand dunes of Al Madam to experience Raven Chacon’s site-responsive sound work ‘A Wandering Breeze’ (2025). This public housing project was built in the 1970s for a Bedouin community but was never inhabited. Its 12 empty houses and a mosque, now filled to the brim with red sand and reverberating with Chacon’s unbound song, honour ancestral sovereignty.

And beckoning us back on a wave of poetry to the April Acts stage, Koleka Putuma’s performance ‘Water’ (Reprise)’ enacted ideas of access and belonging, leisure and trauma, colonisation and custodianship – all wrapped up in water bodies. The South African theatre maker’s moving piece sails from baptism to Bay Watch, landing us with a fearful respect for “going under… into other worlds”. In this way, the swelling waveforms of Putuma’s piece, like all of those sound artists who have borne witness at SB16, “carry a chorus of forms and actions that unfold through voice. Lullabies, laments, stories of the departed, stories whispered – these are our sonic comforts for unhinged times,” Natasha Ginwala noted on stage. Together, we have the possibility to build “a litany for survival with the power to cleanse, ordain, revive… while reminding us of the darkest depths.”

Sharjah Biennial 16 is on view across Sharjah, UAE, until 15 June 2025.