Tasting Tears at the Sharjah Biennial: The International Political Economy of Postcolonial and Decolonial Art

Abstract

This article concerns the challenge of making postcolonial and decolonial art under postcolonial capitalism. A pioneer in the Gulf's growing art scene, the Sharjah Biennial has carved a niche for itself as an incubator of postcolonial and decolonial art. This article first locates the biennial's focus within the trajectories of postcolonial, decolonial, and Black radical theory across the increasingly connected fields of art and academic production. Starting with a close reading of a performance piece by queer Black Cuban artist, Carlos Martiel, observed at the Sharjah Biennial 14, it then blends ethnographic, interview, and historical material to reconstruct the tangible histories of labor, commodity production, and art market liberalization that condition articulations of postcolonial and decolonial art in the Gulf. This political economic prism reveals how capitalist markets dislocate postcolonial and decolonial representation from the specific material conditions of its production. While offering greater visibility to racialized subjects, geographies, and epistemologies, such art thus recalibrates, extends, and embeds the specific racial and colonial hierarchies that structure the international art market and capital accumulation in the Gulf. Observing the imbrication of art and academia, the article therefore also offers a grounded critique of less materialist strands of postcolonial and decolonial theory.