"I'm busy, but I'm never too busy," Hoor Al Qasimi says to me, explaining her multiple professional commitments – as president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and artistic director of the 2025 Aichi Triennale and the 2026 Biennale of Sydney. It is a statement she repeats during the Asia Society India Centre's Trailblazers programme that evening, discussing her current role as president of the International Biennial Association, which comes with significant administrative requirements. Trailblazers is a long-form conversation series focused on artists and creative practitioners; for its inaugural episode on November 9, 2024, Al Qasimi, a 2019 Asia Society Game Changer awardee, was in conversation with Inakshi Sobti, CEO of the Asia Society India Centre.

Speaking to an audience of art patrons and artists in Mumbai, Al Qasimi was transparent about her rarefied position as a member of Sharjah’s ruling family. “When I started, I was 22,” she said. “...they thought, OK, she’s the daughter of the ruler, we’ll make her the director [of the Sharjah Biennial]; she can be happy. But I wanted to change a lot of things. I started questioning things.” This change called for logistical heavy-lifting: “I’m going to clean the floor, stick the labels. I worked with artists and technicians, and we put it up,” she says of her early efforts. Yet, there was also the need to prove that she was qualified to run a biennale. Her gender and age added to the doubt, she felt. She studied curating. “I need[ed] a degree, but I don’t need it.”

Al Qasimi is also conscious of the question of politics and autonomy in the Arab world, where oil and gas-rich nation-states are making huge investments in culture, opening new museums, acquiring significant collections and commissioning large-scale site-specific work. She curated the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, stepping in for late curator Okwui Enwezor, who conceived that edition; the acclaimed exhibition came 20 years after she took over as artistic director and curator of the biennial in 2003. Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with STIR.

Ranjana Dave: Is the short-term nature of a biennale a useful structure in some ways? Does it allow the exhibition model to reinvent itself?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think it's useful for places that have fewer resources for sure. It's useful in the sense that it's flexible in terms of timing. I think the difficult thing with a small team that comes and goes is that continuity is difficult. It's always a struggle to find the right people because people need jobs. They're not going to wait around.

Ranjana: What does that look like for the local arts scene? What about people who live in Sharjah? What does it mean to them to return to the biennial every two years—and not just then—but also all year round?

Hoor: They're there all the time. Our visitor numbers have increased so much. We had 11,500 people on the first day [in 2023], which is a lot for us. It’s taken time for people to come to everything but they come from Dubai, Abu Dhabi, everywhere. So there is a thirst and there is an audience. The Pop South Asia conference – we did it in September. We thought, it's still summertime. It's not going to be very full. We'll do it in one of the galleries. We put some seats out. We had to get more seats. People were still standing in the back. Things are happening in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi [Arabia].

Ranjana: You occupy two different roles. You're definitely in a strategic position as president of the Sharjah Art Foundation and also worked as a curator, most recently, in Sharjah and Lahore. You have often spoken about wanting to engage local communities. And that’s an interesting approach because we see some biennales as very temporary structures – where people get flown in to do something and may not always leave a mark or sink into a place.

Hoor: I don't like to do that. When they invited me to the Lahore Biennale…it was my first experience doing a biennial outside of Sharjah. And I realised that nobody says, wow, I'm going to go to Pakistan! And why is that? Why have I never been to Pakistan? I [first] went two years prior. I kept going. I said, “I’m Lahori, bilkul.” I really navigated the city. I wanted people to move into the city. The furthest I went was the Wagah border. I couldn’t cross, but I was there.

[In the PIA] planetarium, I had a work by an artist from Kazakhstan. She wanted to do a project on the Observatory of Ulugbek in Samarkand. I said, let's search for a planetarium. And the team was looking online and they said, oh, we found one. But nobody's answering the phone. I said, “Can we just go?” And I went and this guy is sitting at the gate and he says – come back in one hour. And we walk in and there's a giant aeroplane on the plot of the planetarium. And it says PIA Airlines. And I said, “Isn't this one of your sponsors? Then we'll ask them if we can use it.” The rooms were dusty and there were posters. ‘Visit Sharjah’. ‘Visit Bradford’. It was everywhere PIA Airlines was going. We cleaned up the place and we used it. And for me, those are the special moments, finding these gems of places that are part of people's histories.

In Tunis, I did the same in an old library [during Dream City 2023]. Every day at 10 am, when we opened, it was full of young people. All it was, was just bringing a place back to life. The seller in the market stall in front kept thanking us every day. He said it was nice to see this place come to life. It's not a big art world moment, but it's special for me. It's also the reaction of the people that were there. That’s also something I felt with locations in Lahore. Because it's about spaces and people's memories, that you’re just kind of looking after. Just cleaning and bringing it back to life.

Ranjana: In the next two years you’re also curating the Biennale of Sydney and the Aichi Triennale. What are your plans for both?

Hoor: It’s great to finally work in Japan after I've been there over 60 times. Each place is very different, of course. I think they have more rules, definitely, Japan and Australia, compared to Cuba and Tunis, even Lahore. But it was an opportunity for me to think about what I could do there. Aichi is a ceramics prefecture. I'm trying to do performances in certain places [and] I'm trying to connect with the youth in Nagoya who don't come to the Aichi Art Centre.

In Sydney, I'm trying to see if I can connect more with the diaspora communities. Sometimes you can put on a beautiful show, but the [entire] budget goes towards shipping. And I would prefer to use the money to do projects that would engage… either collaboratively, through research, or something that is more of a public activity. I'm interested in the people who will visit the biennial, especially since the Biennale of Sydney is free. So I want people to know – this is free, you should come. And you should come every weekend. Because that's what people did for Sharjah. They didn't do the whole biennial in one week. I was getting sad messages in the last month: Please extend it, we're doing a goodbye tour. Every time we close the show, I get messages of crying faces on Instagram.

But it's nice when you see people coming back because it's free. They don't have to see everything at the same time. If I travel [to visit a biennial], I can't see everything. It's fine because it's for the locals. That's what I like.

Ranjana: I wanted to dig into that a bit deeper. India, for instance, has a long history of migration to the UAE. Increasingly, ‘local communities’ are very diverse. But I don’t know if biennials in general, not just in West Asia, are able to address those communities in effective ways, where they are making work for everyone in a city, both the people who see themselves as long-standing residents and people who are migrants, who are coming and going.

Hoor: I think in the UAE, it's different. The audience is very mixed. In Sharjah, [the area] where the biennial happens is old Sharjah. So you have a lot of people from Afghanistan, India, Iran. More so, I'm trying to do things, like in the last edition, in every city. I’m going to the rural areas. One of the venues is in Al Dhaid, which is a Bedouin town in the desert. [And] the east coast, on the border with Oman. So you have a lot of Omanis coming there. But because it's free and it's open, the demographics are very diverse. But that's also the way we were raised in Sharjah. We’ve done tours in Urdu, Hindi, English and Arabic.

Ranjana: You’ve spoken about visiting Documenta and thinking about how you could bring that kind of curatorial focus and artistic practice to Sharjah. We are seeing the traditional axis of power and influence in the arts shift. Biennials are sprouting everywhere. They’re flourishing. Does art change how we see society and read specific parts of the world?

Hoor: Everybody should have a biennial. What I loved about Documenta and I went not knowing anything [about it]—to a town in Germany—someone in Berlin said, go see Documenta [2002]. It was Okwui’s [Enwezor] show that opened my eyes. I had never been to any other biennial other than Sharjah. But Sharjah, visually, it looked like a fair. It was in an expo centre, had booths and it was [organised by] country representation. I already had lots of issues with that. Then I saw this exhibition [Documenta]…and I said, no, we should be like this. Forget country representation. Nobody's from one country anymore. The work should be connected curatorially. There should be a theme.

I learned so much from that one trip at 22. And then I went to Venice and I started seeing more. What I realised is there was a shift at that time. There was an increase in biennials globally in the ‘90s – Gwangju started in 1995, Sharjah in 1993. Also, biennials started to focus more on being about the place you're in and less about the same work travelling. Whenever there's good art, people come.

Ranjana: And what does that mean specifically in terms of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)? Because we're seeing lots of new initiatives.

Hoor: Each city is doing its own thing. I think it's great that there's diversity in the programming. People want to go to commercial galleries. We don't have them in Sharjah. They have them in Dubai. They want to go see the Louvre or the Guggenheim– it’s in Abu Dhabi. Sometimes we can collaborate. Sometimes the projects are too different. But I think it's a great opportunity; because of the increase in art activity in Abu Dhabi, we have visitors coming from there. We have visitors coming from Saudi. They don't have to fly far away. It's just one hour.

Ranjana: To end, I wanted to ask about the curatorial model for Sharjah Biennial 2025. You have five curators. And that’s an interesting model because it decentralises the singular curatorial perspective…

Hoor: I did the last one on my own. So this time, [I thought], I’m going to invite everybody!

Ranjana: But it's also a complicated model as we've seen with ruangrupa [at Documenta 2022], for instance. What made you choose that?

Hoor: They’re all great curators and I really work well with all of them. I've known them separately. And I've admired their work in different ways. So for me, it was a great opportunity to see how they can come together because…I put them together. They had no idea. But there's some synergy in the kind of artists and projects that they're interested in. It's a lot of work for the team, of course, because of all the time zones to coordinate. But it's coming together really well.