IBA Stage: Sharjah Biennial 16 – Amal Khalaf

Curator of Sharjah Biennail 16 Amal Khalaf. Photo: Christa Holka. Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

IBA Stage: Sharjah Biennial 16
June 6, 2025 (Friday) and June 10, 2025 (Tuesday)
1:00 pm (Sharjah/GMT+4)

As we prepare for our upcoming IBA Stage program dedicated to Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, we continue to highlight the five curators whose contributions have shaped this edition. Today, we introduce Amal Khalaf, a curator and artist whose practice has long explored the entanglements between art, social justice, and civic imagination.

Based in London, Amal Khalaf is currently Director of Cubitt and Curator at Large at the Serpentine, where she has overseen the development of a transformative civic programme, commissioning over 50 long-term, collaborative projects and moving image works. Her curatorial approach foregrounds structural change and collective agency, creating platforms that center voices and communities often excluded from dominant institutional narratives.

Khalaf’s work is deeply invested in infrastructure-building, institutional accountability, and feminist methodologies. Her curatorial projects such as the Edgware Road Project, Centre for Possible Studies, Radio Ballads, and Sensing the Planet, reveal a sustained commitment to horizontal forms of knowledge production and co-creation. She curated the Bahrain Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale and co-directed the Global Art Forum at Art Dubai in 2016, extending her engagement with transnational networks and cultural dialogues.

Within Sharjah Biennial 16, Khalaf’s curatorial contribution resonates with the biennial’s guiding theme to carry, positioning art as a means of holding intergenerational knowledge, situated memory, and collective struggle. Through her work, the biennial becomes a place of gathering and listening—attuned to histories of migration, colonial entanglement, and community resistance.

We are honored to welcome Amal Khalaf as a speaker in Part I of the IBA Stage conversation on June 6, 2025, alongside fellow curators Alia Swastika and Natasha Ginwala.

Stay tuned for more news from us on this upcoming IBA Stage event and keep following communications on the Sharjah Biennial here.

To have the possibility to hear and discuss with the individuals behind biennials has been a key component of what we believe IBA can offer to our members and the wider public and we value your participation through our live streams. As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Click here to register for the first part of the event!

Click here to register for the second part of the event!

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