Sharjah is often a surprise to first-time visitors. Upon arrival, they find little of the glitz and architectural excesses of neighboring Dubai, and instead a more modest, even walkable city, bustling with street life. A town of seafarers and pearl divers until the mid-20th century, Sharjah missed out on most of the oil wealth that reshaped the UAE after independence of 1971. As a result, nation-building efforts left a trace that is still present in its urban fabric, in the shape of modernist schools and office buildings that often relied on the same typology repeated across the emirate. Buildings such as the now-vacant Radisson Blu Resort, designed by The Architects Collective, are currently on the radar of architecture enthusiasts (see the recent Building Sharjah volume). And yet, here like elsewhere, modernism was a double-headed beast, at once bringing progress and dispossessionsomething that was made evident by DAARs poignant installation for the 2023 Architecture Triennial. While the Triennial is young (disclosure: I worked for the first one in 2019 as its head of publications), the Sharjah Art Biennial, on view at various venues through June 15, 2025, is now in its 16th iteration, and each edition consolidates the emirates standing as a global art center. (Its driving force, Hoor Al Qasimi, topped ArtReviews Power 100 list last year). This year, the Biennial is organized by a team of five renowned curators: Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep z. They have succeeded in putting together an organic show, where the interests of each are (usually) discernible, yet the seams are (almost) invisible. Under the title to carry, they ask us to consider what we bring with us when we travel, flee, survive or stay. Displacement is as poignant a topic as its ever been, as people from the U.S.Mexico border to Gaza are having to carry their home, however they might understand it, with them. But its also the burdens we all carrytraumas, difficulties of generations pastsomething that resonated on a personal level, as I attended the biennials opening while grieving a recent death.Mahmoud Khaled, Pool of Perspectives 2030, 2025. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Arts Palace, Al Dhaid, Sharjah, 2025. (Motaz Mawid)With each edition the Biennial also expands its presence in the city and beyond, and there are now over a dozen venues stretching as far as the emirates eastern coast. Central to Al Qasimis vision for the Biennial has been the repurposing of the Sharjahs architectural heritage, the modernist as well as the older one. Here, there is no such thing as Abu Dhabis Saadiyat district with its big-name museums. Instead, the Al Mureijah spaces in central Sharjah (designed by Mona El Mousfy, who was shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award) are a collection of reconstructed coral-stone houses, complemented by new buildings that follow the ancient street pattern. One pleasingly gets lost in the alleys, and the galleries ever-changing proportions make for a visit that is never boring. While the breadth of the artists backgrounds and career stages, and the amount of new commissions, is itself an achievement, not all of the works feel substantial. The Biennial is at its best when it establishes connections with its distinctive spatial contextwhen the artworks convey a sense of specificity and texture that is a much-needed antidote to sanitized white-cube spaces elsewhere. In Al Mureijah, Jorge Gonzlez Santos has taken over one of the few unrenovated houses, turning its roofless rooms and leafy courtyard into a peaceful arrangement of objects by the Tano peoples of Puerto Rico. Joe Namys bamboo and palm-frond broadcasting tower speaks to the early history of radio, with a sound montage that enters in an unexpected dialogue with the adhan of nearby mosques. One of the newer galleries works well for the standout combination of works by Monira Al Qadiri and Stephanie Comilang, both portrayals of the liquid identities that define contemporary life in the Gulf.Doruntina Kastrati, The Dance of Sand and Steel, 2024. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Old Al Dhaid Clinic, Sharjah, 2025. (Shanavas Jamaluddin)A short walk away along the corniche are two large 19th-century merchant houses, which were among the first venues of the Sharjah Art Foundation. Here, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser continue their haunting material and sonic explorations of the Indian subcontinent (the formers Static Range was recently at the Art Institute of Chicago) with a film about the Great Indian Hedge, planted by colonial Britain to prevent salt smuggling. The interplay of art and place is perhaps most successful in the agricultural town of Al Dhaid, almost 40 miles east of Sharjah, where the rooms of a 1970s clinic, entered from covered paths amid a leafy garden, have been transformed into exhibition spaces. Inside, the copper-wire weavings of Ximena Garrido-Lecca and the sculptures of Luana Vitra propose a fresh, non-didactic take on the conflicts over land that are at play in places like Peru and Brazil, while Akira Ikezoes canvases and stop-motion film make bitter fun of the technocratic hubris that has led to historys worst nuclear accidents.YAZ publication annotations. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Arts Palace, Al Dhaid, Sharjah, 2025. (Shanavas Jamaluddin)Just outside, the Guatemalan artist Hellen Ascoli has taken over a crumbling mud-brick house, where her installation of sliding fabrics and timber frames remind us of the global history of building technologies that are only apparently simple. The wasteful megaprojects that plague the rest of the UAE are hinted at in Mahmoud Khaleds arresting empty pool, tiled in digitally printed azulejos that at once hail to former Portuguese colonial presence in the Gulf, and mock the aesthetic of architectural renders.Hellen Ascoli, The World Upside Down, 2024. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City. Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Arts Palace and Farm, Al Dhaid, Sharjah, 2025. (Danko Stjepanovic)This Biennial has many threads. They arent always readable but yield unexpected resonances across space and timemost evidently in the in the seaside exhibition venues of Al Hamriyah, where a 1970s government office sits next to a pristine white block. The themes of futurity and of ideas being carried by sonic waves underpin a new work by Luke Willis Thompson. Whakamoemoea is a fictitious broadcast delivered by a real-life television journalist, relaying a future in which sovereignty in New Zealand is returned to the Mori. In a standout film, Chibayish, Alia Farid takes us to the disappearing marshes of Iraq. What could have easily been told as a didactic story of ecological damage is insteadthanks to a camera that always stays close to its subjectsan intimate, humble portrait of a waning way of life, where environmental threats are barely hinted at and yet impossible to ignore.Andrea Bagnato is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of urban history and political ecology.