Hugh Hayden at Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE
15 April 2025
Until 15 June, The 16th Sharjah Biennial features works by Hugh Hayden. The Sharjah Biennial title, To Carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.
To Carry entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?
The Biennial explores a collective wayfinding, a modality of sense-making and insistent looking—back, inwards and across—instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny. The Sharjah Biennial curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. As community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition, the projects collectively form a threshold space for experiments and collaborations, in which we compose divergent stories, understand failures and dark moments, and hold room for tenderness and rage.
Crafting metaphors for human existence and past experience, Hugh Hayden’s work questions the stasis of social dynamics and asks the viewer to examine their place within an ever-shifting ecosystem. Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Hayden transforms familiar objects through a process of selection, carving and juxtaposing to challenge our perceptions of ourselves, others and the environment.
Find out more via The Sharjah Biennial.
Image: Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.
