Featured in Berlin Art Link

Highlights from Sharjah Biennial 16 Zadie Xa with Benito Mayor Vallejo: ‘Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything’ (2025) . (This link opens in a new tab).

27 February 2025

Sharjah Biennial 16 opened to the public on February 6th at 16 venues across the Emirate of Sharjah. This sprawling showcase of international contemporary art features over 650 works by more than 190 participants, including over 200 new commissions. Curated under the title ‘to carry’ by a team of five curators⁠—Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz—it reflects on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. In Ginwala’s words, ‘to carry’ is an invitation that “calls to linking thought and movement through collective making, hosting and being hosted across sites of land and sea, to carry attests to modes of labor, homage, rejection, affinity, mourning and transformation.”

Zadie Xa’s ‘Ghost’ (2025), a mobile sculpture inspired by seashell wind chimes and Korean shamanic rattles, consists of over 1000 chained brass bells that form a conch shell, with a sound component activated when touched. It hangs mid-air within the larger installation, ‘Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything’ (2025), which Xa co-created with Benito Mayor Vallejo. Inspired by Salpuri, a Korean exorcism dance, the sound installation ‘Confessions under moonlight’ (2025) features a soundscape of folklore, confessions, natural elements and musical notes. Through oracular listening sessions, the audience is invited to commune with the supernatural. “I wanted to think about ways in which we might communicate with people⁠—and when I say people I don’t only mean humans⁠—that have passed on, and what kind of things they would like to impart to us, which is not always going to be nice,” Xa explained.