WAEL SHAWKY, THE TRADITION OF THE QAWALLI, AND THE MOBILE HABITAT OF THE MOTHER TONGUE

My first experience of Wael Shawky’s performance work was at the opening of the Eleventh Sharjah Biennial on March 13, 2013. It was in fact the first time the project was publicly performed after a planning and preparation period that began at the preceding biennial in 2011. Foreign press, curators, and artists had gathered at the entry to the newly renovated Sharjah Heritage Area, the preserved urban core to the city consisting of traditional Emirati homes built over a half century before – ancient when compared to the outlandish glass-and-steel juggernauts that dominate the city’s horizon line in the twentyfirst century. In preparation for the 2011 Biennial, the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) converted several of the traditional homes into austere, pristinely designed exhibition spaces while maintaining the intimate, close-knit grid of the original structures’ plans.1 The buildings are so close together that the exterior space of the Heritage Area functions like a network of open-air hallways flanked by the high, sun-eclipsing walls of the white-washed new galleries. The group of art world interlocutors, dressed eloquently and perusing their biennial guides, paused at the opening of one of these passages as attendants blocked the way, asking them to wait for the beginning of the performance. The sounds of the swiftly moving traffic that surrounds the Heritage Area and bellowing calls to prayer from the city’s numerous mosques drifted over the scene.