Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has opened the large‑scale exhibition Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection in Kalba, which marks the first major presentation of its collection on the UAE’s east coast. Running through 31 May 2026, the show, spread across Kalba Ice Factory and the nearby house of Saeed bin Hamad Al Qasimi, transforms the Gulf of Oman shoreline into a new focal point for contemporary art.
Curator Jiwon Lee frames the exhibition through the concept of tanah air — “land and water”, a term that simultaneously denotes homeland and links different shores to one another. “We were interested in how waters not only divide territories but also connect them: if you are bound by the sea to another shore, you in some way belong to it as well,” the curator notes, emphasising that the project gathers “small pieces of evidence” of connections that are often erased by ideologies and maps.
The exhibition presents rarely shown large‑scale works by nine artists and collectives: Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, Taloi Havini, Walid Siti, GCC, Nabil El Makhloufi, Nesrine Khodr, Marwan Rechmaoui, Jompet Kuswidananto, and John Akomfrah.
In the video work “Plate it with Silver”, Afrassiabi and Tabatabai explore the shores of the Strait of Hormuz and the lives of people whose everyday existence is tied to the sea, winds and routes between the two sides of the Gulf. The artists show how beliefs and stories “cross over” the water, forming shared communities regardless of state borders.
Taloi Havini’s installation “Beroana IV (shell money)” consists of a suspended spiral of ceramic elements that echo the shell currency Beroana, still in use in Bougainville and other parts of Papua New Guinea. The curator points out that the artist “translates traditional currency into sculptural form to speak about resources, colonial history, and the ways land and sea continue to shape economies and rituals”.
Two works by Walid Siti, “False Flags” and “Phantom Land”, unfold a critique of the usual symbolism of borders. In “False Flags”, fishing nets are hung like a row of colourless “flags”, undermining the expected rhetoric of national banners and turning them into transparent, porous structures through which everything remains visible; “Phantom Land” presents a vast, colourless landscape without cartographic divisions, offering an image of homeland as a shifting, constantly renegotiated notion.
One of the important anchor points of the exhibition is John Akomfrah’s three‑channel video “Vertigo Sea”, immersing the viewer in a hypnotic combination of seascapes, archival footage of whaling, migration routes and disasters. The exhibition texts stress that this work “culminates” the route through the halls of Kalba Ice Factory, bringing together the themes of violence, beauty, memory, and human presence in the oceanic space.
According to the curator, “the exhibition does not propose a utopian view of belonging”. Instead, it opens up a space for questions about “what ties us to a place and what, on the contrary, cuts us off from it”, and how water can be used to imagine the notion of the border differently. In this context, Kalba Ice Factory, a former ice plant from the 1970s, becomes not only an exhibition venue but also part of the statement. Industrial architecture on the shoreline literally embodies the intersection of land, water, and the history of labour.
Of Land and Water is a key case in how SAF works with landscape and heritage. Taking the collection beyond Sharjah’s central districts and situating it in Kalba shows how the east coast is becoming an autonomous artistic node with a strong conceptual agenda.
To learn more about Of Land and Water, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in visiting the Urdu Worlds exhibition.
