It’s fair to say that artists aren’t going to save the world. But this exhibition at C3A proceeds from the limited if hopeful assumption that they might be able to make a difference. “Ecologies of Peace” emerged from a series of partnerships between TBA21 and underfunded regional institutions, and at first glance, its title shares a sunny vagueness familiar from biennials in other parts of the world. Curated by Daniela Zyman, it claims to focus on “practices of mourning and forgiveness,” though, for the most part, it illustrates the scale of the devastation that calls for them.
Alongside pioneering abstract art in Indonesia, Ahmad Sadali was an influential scholar and religious thinker, a public muralist who strived to ignite the spirit of liberation during the 1945 war, a national representative at UNESCO, an observer at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and an orator at Jummah prayers. Yet even before his death in 1987, his legacy—like that of the Bandung School with which he was affiliated—was dogged by controversy over its relationship to western art histories.
Counterhegemonic generative AI is a fantasy […] Materially, they are dependent on arrangements established by colonialism and the ongoing concentration of wealth and intellectual resources in the hands of very few men; ideologically they require increasing alienation and the elimination of difference. At best, these experiments offer us a pale reflection of intellectual engagement and collective social life. At worst, they contribute to the destruction of diverse communities and the very conditions for the solidarity required for real resistance.
This sixteenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial—curated by Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell—foregrounds on work that is firmly grounded in its cultural contexts and unambiguous in its ethical commitments. But it is less clear that all of them triumph on their own terms as sculptures, videos, installations, or any of the other aesthetic strategies through which it is possible “to carry”—as the exhibition’s title puts it—ideas, principles, and feelings across the borders separating people, communities, and cultures.
The first striking thing about the work in “Electric Dreams” is how much of it is solid, physically insistent, handmade or drawn, not dramatically departing, in material or form or modes of display, from mid-century conventions in painting and sculpture. In the context of this show, some of the early works can appear quaintly mechanical instead of digital. But they appeal to an idea of the programmed machine.
Radha D’Souza outlined five foundational liberal fictions: the nature-people divide; the two-faced state comprising democracy and security; the fallacy of legal personhood, by which a corporation has the same rights as a natural person; and the idea that science and technology will solve all the world’s problems. D’Souza’s fifth myth was in fact a truth: as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, good propaganda should never lie but “decide what to tell and what not to tell.”
As the shortlisted artists and curators for the Australian Pavillion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, we are writing in support of the winning team; Khaled Sabsabi (artist) and Michael Dagostino (curator), selected by industry led experts through a rigorous and professionally independent open-call process.
