There are a few things people are always quietly craving: good sleep, good food, and good art. The first is on you. The second — we occasionally help with (have a look at our listings). And the third? Well, we might have something for you.

First things first, Art Dubai is just around the corner. But before that — and even after — it is worth remembering that Sharjah remains one of the most rewarding places for art in the region, especially if you are looking for something a little more considered.

Think of this as a warm-up to Art Dubai — a way to ease into the mood before the pace picks up. And a rather good one at that, with Sharjah Art Foundation currently presenting a number of exhibitions that are genuinely worth your time.

So, here we go: three exhibitions to see at the foundation this month, along with a few insights from the curators to guide you through them.

Until June 7

Time the Destroyer is Time the Preserver brings together a vast body of work at Sharjah Art Foundation — eight chapters, more than 170 works, and a practice that stretches across decades.

The title already points you in the right direction. Borrowed from T. S. Eliot, it circles around destruction, violence and resistance — not as things that simply pass, but as something that lingers. The exhibition brings together works Tacla has made over more than 40 years, from the 1980s through to the 2020s, placing them side by side so that different moments can speak to each other — rather than sitting neatly in sequence.

Although the exhibition is organised into eight chapters, it doesn’t follow a linear timeline. That is partly down to Tacla’s own way of working — his pieces don’t respond directly to a single triggering event, but unfold over time. He has long worked across multiple bodies of work at once, often returning to the same themes from different angles. So the eight-chapter structure is something that was proposed by the Sharjah Art Foundation curators — less a strict chronology, and more a way of navigating these recurring ideas.

What is there exactly?

Each of the eight chapters opens onto a different thread within Jorge Tacla’s practice — not separate sections, but ideas that move alongside each other.

One thread shifts between the environmental, the social, and the political.

In the first two chapters, Tacla turns to landscapes like the Atacama Desert — one of the driest, most seemingly empty places on Earth. But here, the desert isn’t just a natural setting. It becomes political. He draws out its layered histories, including its connection to the 1973 Chilean military coup, when, after the overthrow of Salvador Allende, parts of this landscape were used to bury the disappeared — to conceal what the regime wanted erased.

He returns to this period more directly in Injury Report (chapter four), one of the central bodies of work in his practice. Instead of showing violence outright, the series leans on the language of official records — hospital files, police documents — creating a clinical, almost bureaucratic tone that quietly points to what people endured.

In the final chapter, Tacla moves beyond Chile, tracing sites of conflict and catastrophe across different geographies — Aleppo, Beirut, Gaza, as well as earthquake-struck regions in Haiti and Japan. These aren’t presented as separate events. They begin to blur into something shared — a broader condition of rupture, and the slow, uneven process of rebuilding.

Personal note:

I loved the exhibition as a whole, but the part that stayed with me most sits in Gallery 2 — chapter five, The Anatomy of Dyslexia. Unlike the other chapters, which are tied to specific events, this one shifts the focus to a condition — and in doing so, it quietly reveals something essential about the way Tacla’s work operates.

This section moves away from the large-scale pieces and into something much more personal: Jorge Tacla’s notebooks. They are not sketches in the usual sense, but more like a daily ritual — something he keeps returning to. He speaks about them almost as a kind of filter. A way of dealing with everything that keeps coming at us — news, images, events — all that constant noise we go through without really taking in.

This is where dyslexia comes in. Not in a clinical sense, but in terms of how information is processed — uneven, fragmented, and not always easy to hold together. You begin to see these traces in the drawings: things don’t quite settle, there isn’t a single narrative to follow, and everything appears in parts rather than as a complete whole.

At that point, the notebooks stop feeling like background material and start to sit at the centre of the work. They offer a way of understanding how Tacla takes in what is happening around him and deals with the constant flow of information.

Until May 31

Location: Kalba Ice Factory

The title pretty much holds the essence of the works within the exhibition, though it does require a bit of context — and here it is. In Malay, the word for homeland — tanah air — literally combines “land” and “water”. It is not just poetic; it gently shifts the whole idea of belonging. And that is very much the feeling of the show.

Across nine artists, a quiet thread runs through it all. Through this connection between land and water, they explore their homelands from different angles — cultural, economic, and emotional.

What is there exactly?

The exhibition is composed of different approaches, with artists choosing to look at land and water through the lens of their countries of origin. A few examples:

Nothing here is trying to give you a fixed answer. It is more about sitting with that in-between space — where land meets water, and where belonging is never just one thing.

Whenever you find yourself at Sharjah Art Foundation, there is one exhibition that is always there and that is Photographic Encounters along the Gulf Coasts.

Comprising 165 photographs and archival documents from the collection of His Highness Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, it offers a rare kind of immersion into the region — one that, for no real reason, often feels slightly underestimated.

The exhibition brings together images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs trace the shores of the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, capturing a moment in time shaped by trade, movement, culture, and belief.

Many of the images remain partially undocumented — their exact authors, dates, and locations are not always known. Because of this, moving through the exhibition feels less like viewing a fixed history and more like piecing together fragments — almost like a quiet investigation.

What is there exactly?

The exhibition moves across quite a wide range of themes, but a few things stayed with me: