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The Biennial official book cover

Translation

Carrying Forward: Nasser Al-Yousif's Posthumous Presence in Sharjah Biennial 16

The inclusion of Nasser Al-Yousif in Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry (February 6 - June 15, 2025) represents a profound moment of recognition for an artist whose life's work embodied the very essence of the Biennial's central proposition. Nearly two decades after his death in 2006, Al-Yousif's art continues to resonate within contemporary dialogues about heritage, memory, and the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations. His participation in this expansive exhibition, which brings together nearly 200 artists from around the world, affirms his enduring relevance to conversations about what we carry—as individuals, communities, and cultures—through time and space.

The Act of Carrying: A Lifetime's Practice

The Biennial's multivocal title, to carry, could serve as a retrospective framework for understanding Al-Yousif's entire artistic journey. Throughout his career, from the 1960s until his death, Al-Yousif carried the weight and beauty of Bahraini heritage in his canvases. Born in Muharraq in 1940, he grew up surrounded by the ornate plaster decorations of traditional houses, the rhythmic patterns of bisht embroidery in his family's workshop, and the epic tales of divers returning from pearl-hunting expeditions. These early impressions became the cargo he would carry throughout his artistic life, transforming childhood memories into a visual language that spoke both to local authenticity and universal human experiences.

Al-Yousif's art was fundamentally an act of carrying—carrying the stories of pearl divers from the depths of the Gulf waters to the surface of his canvases, carrying the geometric patterns of Islamic architecture from crumbling facades to permanent artistic record, carrying the warmth of communal gatherings and the solitude of individual struggle. His statement, "People without heritage have no value," reveals his understanding of cultural carrying as essential to human dignity and identity.

Resonances with Curatorial Themes

The five curators of SB16—Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz—each bring distinct perspectives that illuminate different facets of Al-Yousif's practice. Swastika's focus on "the foundational role of women's knowledge" connects with Al-Yousif's consistent portrayal of women as keepers of tradition and symbols of continuity in Bahraini society. His paintings often depicted women as central figures in domestic and cultural life, from the mysterious dove-like presences in his allegorical works to the strong matriarchal figures presiding over family gatherings.

Khalaf's proposition of "storytelling, song and divination as rituals for collective learning and resistance" directly echoes Al-Yousif's own methodology. His illustrations for Ali Abdullah Khalifa's poetry collection Thirst of Palms (1970) and his visual interpretations of mawwals (traditional sung poetry) demonstrate how he understood art as a form of cultural divination—reading the signs of the past to navigate the present and future. The black ink drawings he created in 1968-69, with their "extreme spontaneity and simplicity," functioned as visual mawwals, carrying emotional and cultural frequencies across time.

Natasha Ginwala's centering of "littoral sites in the Indian Ocean and water wells in Sharjah as reservoirs that avow ancestral memory" provides a geographical and conceptual framework for understanding Al-Yousif's diving paintings. His series of seven large-scale oil paintings about pearl diving (1969) can be read as profound meditations on the Gulf as a site of both sustenance and struggle, where generations of men descended into darkness to bring up treasures that would circulate in global networks of trade and desire. The wells and water bodies that Ginwala identifies as "reservoirs" of memory find their parallel in Al-Yousif's canvases, which served as reservoirs for the stories, struggles, and dreams of a maritime culture in transition.

Dialogue with Contemporary Participants

Al-Yousif's presence in SB16 creates fascinating dialogues with contemporary artists exploring similar themes. Mariam M. Alnoaimi's work on "the Gulf region's relationships with water bodies as living entities" and her reperformance of local rituals speaks directly to Al-Yousif's own treatment of the sea as a living presence in Bahraini life. While Alnoaimi approaches these relationships through contemporary concerns about land reclamation and environmental change, Al-Yousif's historical perspective provides a baseline for understanding what has been transformed and what persists.

The exhibition's emphasis on collective processes and communal worlding also reflects Al-Yousif's own practice. His involvement with the "family of art enthusiasts" in Bahrain—including Karim Al-Areedh, Rashid Sawar, and others—prefigures contemporary collaborative practices like The Weaving Project or the Concrete Thread Repertoire. Al-Yousif understood art-making as inherently communal, rooted in shared experiences and collective memory.

Technology, Tradition, and Transformation

Zeynep Öz's curatorial focus on "societal and economic systems... developed in response to accelerated changes in technology and science" provides another lens through which to view Al-Yousif's work. His experimentation with zinc etching after encountering the technique at the 1980 Asilah Festival in Morocco demonstrates his openness to new technologies while maintaining fidelity to traditional subjects and themes. This balance between innovation and tradition—between carrying forward and adapting—exemplifies the kind of creative negotiation that many SB16 artists explore.

Perhaps most poignantly, Al-Yousif's continued artistic production after losing his sight speaks to the Biennial's investigation of how we carry knowledge in embodied forms. Using the same black ink techniques from his earlier work, he created what Abdullah Youssef called "striking new works" that challenged his blindness through "insight with solid will and high determination." This transformation of limitation into possibility resonates with works in SB16 that address resilience, adaptation, and the multiple ways of seeing and knowing.

Carrying Forward: Legacy and Futurity

Al-Yousif's inclusion in Sharjah Biennial 16 is more than a retrospective honor; it's an active engagement with his work as a living force in contemporary artistic discourse. The Biennial's subtitle could be extended: "to carry forward," acknowledging how Al-Yousif's artistic investigations continue to generate meaning in new contexts. His exploration of doors as thresholds and beginnings takes on new significance in an exhibition structured around passages and transitions. His recurring motifs of doves, cats, and roosters join a larger menagerie of symbolic animals in the Biennial, each carrying their own cultural codes and mythological weights.

The Biennial's structure, with works by multiple curators forming "confluences" and "hybrid constellations" in each space, mirrors Al-Yousif's own synthetic approach to art-making. He drew from Islamic aesthetics, folk traditions, modernist techniques, and personal memory to create a unique visual language that was simultaneously deeply local and broadly communicable. This ability to hold multiple influences and speak to diverse audiences makes his work particularly relevant to SB16's polyphonic ambitions.

Conclusion: The Eternal Return

In his 1994 interview, Al-Yousif spoke of the door as "the beginning of things... the key to all knowledge." His presence in Sharjah Biennial 16 opens a door between past and present, between the pioneering generation of Gulf artists and contemporary practitioners grappling with accelerated change and persistent traditions. The Biennial asks, "What do we carry when we survive?" Al-Yousif's art provides one answer: we carry stories, we carry beauty, we carry the responsibility to document and transmit, we carry the courage to continue creating even when the light fails.

As visitors encounter Al-Yousif's work among the 650 pieces spread across 17 venues in Sharjah, they will experience not just historical artifacts but active participants in ongoing conversations about identity, heritage, and transformation. His paintings of divers ascending from the depths might speak to Yhonnie Scarce's glass yams floating like radioactive clouds; his doors might open onto Fernando Palma Rodríguez's reclaimed ancestral knowledge; his women might join the global sisterhood of Womanifesto's quilted shelters.

Nasser Al-Yousif carried Bahrain's stories to the world and carried the world's artistic innovations back to Bahrain. Now, Sharjah Biennial 16 carries his vision forward, ensuring that his voice remains part of the multivocal chorus addressing our contemporary moment. In this act of cultural carrying, the Biennial fulfills its role as "collective wayfinding," with Al-Yousif serving as both compass and destination—a reminder of where we've been and a guide to where we might go. His art reminds us that to carry is not merely to preserve but to transform, not just to remember but to reimagine, not only to honor the past but to gift it, transformed, to the future.

Translation

مساحة العرض في متحف الشارقة للفنون