Curated by Omar Kholeif, director of collections and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, Unsettled Objects cuts through the mantle and into the core of the imperial connotations of an art world that has become increasingly “globalized.” On view are more than thirty artists whose work has been acquired through more than two decades of the Sharjah Biennial and the foundation’s year-round exhibitions, as well as other commissioning programs.

The Brutalist wonder of Sharjah’s Flying Saucer sits on a cement platform like a shuttle craft freshly landed from deep space. Star-shaped, with a hovering dome, the onetime market, built in 1978, has been reconfigured and opened to the public in September 2020 as a community art space resounding with the collective, vernacular memory of the many lives it’s taken on.

Unsettled Objects, an exhibition drawn from Sharjah Art Foundation’s rarely seen collection, conceives of the venue as a cabinet of curiosities, overflowing with works beyond the interior of its circular structure. Encompassing a diverse body of works, the exhibition ventures to reimagine the authorship of history as it pertains to tangible heritage and looks at the problematics of collection and display in a globalized, postcolonial art world. From the 1920s to the present day, it is a conceptual disassembling of the Western-style museum collection, often anchored in the imperialist histories of their formation. With Unsettled Objects, the foundation aims to echo an opportune moment in the universal debate on restitution to deconstruct art history’s structuralist East/West binary oppositions and introduce a South-South semiology. To do so, Kholeif argues for a curatorial and programming framework that not only springs from the hyperlocal but also responds to it. In the exhibition publication, Kholeif writes, “The works accessioned into the consortium were either commissioned in or for Sharjah. Others emerged from life-long collaborations with artists, or are carefully selected artworks brought into the institution’s holdings to narrate a part of art’s history that may otherwise remain unseen.”

This exhibition guide documents the recent and rarely seen acquisitions from Sharjah Art Foundation’s holdings. The show derives its title from Lothar Baumgarten’s featured artwork, Unsettled Objects (1968–1969), a slide-carousel projection filmed in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.

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