SHARJAH BIENNIAL 14

he contemporary art world is an echo chamber par excellence, replete with its own media outlets, celebrity pundits, trolls, dominant discourses and jargon. Its insularity—enforced by its often-perceived exclusivity and aloofness from real-world concerns—further enforces the gap between the conversations happening in here and out there. As for what’s happening out there, we might agree that the problem is what Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi calls the “noise of mainstream media coverage, conspiracy theories, sensationalized storytelling and social media feeds … that prevents people from engaging with each other in complex ways.” The effort to combat those realities, and the urgency that many cultural institutions feel to connect artists’ stories with the public, animated Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) to become a site of more socially productive and richer