Image Keepers: Photographic Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

Curated by Jiwon Lee, Head of Curatorial at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Image Keepers will inaugurate Sharjah Art Foundation’s newest venue, the Photography Gallery, a recently renovated telecommunications building dedicated to the medium.

In its inaugural exhibition, the Photography Gallery presents a panorama of artistic experimentation and engagement through the medium of photography. Drawn from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, the works navigate the socio-political terrain of the last six decades against a backdrop of the compressed, and often fissured, processes of modernisation and decolonisation.

In its inaugural exhibition, the Photography Gallery presents a panorama of artistic experimentation and engagement through the medium of photography. Drawn from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, the works navigate the sociopolitical terrain of the last six decades against a backdrop of the compressed, and often fissured, processes of modernisation and decolonisation.

On the lower floor, portraits testify to the diversity of experience across regions and times. The images record expressions of ethnic, civic and diasporic identities while revealing the intricate relationships formed between individuals and place. In the next section are works that use photography to depict what is obscured or made absent during times of conflict and transnational migration. The artists give the images form by embracing opacity, dissolving reality into abstraction or focusing on what is left behind. The exhibition continues on the upper floor, where photography is embodied through multifarious materials, techniques and modes of presentation. In search of alternative ways to narrate history and envisage collectivity, the works deconstruct monuments and archives and reinvent them through speculation, performativity and humour.

In Zineb Sedira’s Image Keepers (2010), from which this show takes its title, a guardian keeps an archive of photographs that record tumultuous societal change and aspirations for independence. This exhibition is a nod to such fearless artistic practices from across the world, which have shaped the trajectory of the Foundation since 2009.