SHARJAH.- Sharjah Art Foundation announced that Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento have been appointed as the curators of Sharjah Biennial 17, opening in January 2027.

Harutyunyan is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, Berlin University of the Arts and Nascimento is an independent curator and architect based in Luanda.


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“Since 2003, Sharjah Biennial has been a platform for creative experimentation, collaboration and social impact. Rooted in our local context, we have fostered a place of significant regional and international exchange, bridging cultures and shared histories,” says Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. “Angela Harutyunyan and Paula Nascimento each bring distinct perspectives shaped by their individual practices. Sharjah Biennial 17 will be a space for critical engagement and collective reflection, where their curatorial visions can collaboratively explore new contemporary realities.”

Working in close collaboration, the curators will shape the Biennial as a space for critical reflection and experimental exhibition-making, exploring alternative contemporary realities and the imaginative potential of art, through a wide range of artistic projects presented in sites across Sharjah.


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“The possibilities and limitations of the biennial form in making visible the uneven temporal rhythms that pulsate beneath contemporaneity are of particular interest to me,” says Harutyunyan. “I would like to examine the ways in which artworks encapsulate and figurate decaying but undead afterlives of the emancipatory projects of non-capitalist modernity.”

For Paula Nascimento, biennials are fundamental spaces to experiment with forms and models of exhibition-making, and as well as places for gathering communities and fostering social and physical transformation. “I am interested in thinking with artists and in the articulations between artmaking and infrastructure in an expanded way, as well as exploring art’s capacity to imagine and propose spaces and other worlds and forms of relations,” she says.

Based in Berlin, Angela Harutyunyan (b. 1982, Gyumri, Armenia) is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities, Yeravan, and the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research. She has curated several exhibitions, including This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time (with Nat Muller) at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2014) and the American University of Beirut Art Galleries (2015). Harutyunyan obtained her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2009 and previously taught at the American University in Cairo (2009–2010) and at the American University of Beirut (2011–2023). One of the founding editors of ARTMargins, she has extensively researched and written on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. She is the author of The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’ 1987–1994 (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Paula Nascimento (b. 1981, Luanda, Angola) is an architect and independent curator based in Luanda. Her practice is rooted at the intersection of visual arts, urbanism, geopolitics and arts education. Nascimento engages with interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on contemporary readings of historical themes in and around Africa and the Global South. An associate curator of the sixth and seventh editions of the Lubumbashi Biennial (2019, 2022), she has also developed projects and curated exhibitions internationally, including Rencontres de Bamako – African Biennale of Photography, Experimenta Design, Triennale di Milano and the Angola Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for best national participation in 2013. She is a curatorial advisor to Hangar Centre of Artistic Research, Lisbon and a member of the acquisitions committee of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian.