IBA Stage: Sharjah Biennial 16 – Natasha Ginwala

Curator of Sharjah Biennail 16 Natasha Ginwala. 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 part of our lead-up to the upcoming IBA Stage event dedicated to Sharjah Biennial 16 to carry, we continue our series presenting the five curators who have collectively shaped this edition. Today, we turn to Natasha Ginwala, a curator and writer whose practice is defined by the engagement with transhistorical memory, embodied resistance, and the use of exhibition-making as a political and poetic act.

Natasha Ginwala is Artistic Director of COLOMBOSCOPE in Colombo and served as Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018–2024). She was Artistic Director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale (Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, 2021), alongside Defne Ayas, and has been part of the curatorial teams for some of the most influential exhibitions of the past decade, including documenta 14, Contour Biennale 8, and the 8th editions of both the Berlin Biennale and Taipei Biennial. She has further contribute in various roles to exhibitions and editorial projects at e-flux, Sharjah Art Foundation, Hamburger Bahnhof, ifa Gallery, MCA Chicago, KW Institute, and Zeitz MOCAA.

Through both her writing and curatorial work, Ginwala builds bridges between artistic practice and historical insurgency. In Sharjah Biennial 16, her contribution expands the title to carry as an invocation, carrying spirit knowledge, feminine cosmologies, and geographies of refusal. Working across performance, sound, ritual, and oral narrative, she positions the exhibition as a space of embodied encounter and temporal dissonance, where the past is not behind us, but pressing at the seams of the present.

Her role in Sharjah Biennial 16 reaffirms a commitment to exhibition-making as a methodology for collective research and affective memory. The biennial becomes not only a platform for presenting work but a terrain of reorientation, a site in which to listen, remember, and remain accountable.

Join us on June 6, 2025, at 1:00 PM Sharjah Time, for the first session of our IBA Stage event, where Natasha Ginwala will appear in conversation with fellow curators Alia Swastika and Amal Khalaf. Together, they will reflect on the many-layered processes and resonances that shaped this edition of the Sharjah Biennial and speak to the expanded temporality and ethics of carrying that informed their curatorial approaches.

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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