Vantage Point 13

Sharjah Art Foundation's long-running photography platform returns for its thirteenth edition with Vantage Point 13, on view from 8 August to 29 November 2026 in Gallery 2 of the Photography Gallery at Al Manakh, Sharjah. The exhibition brings together newly commissioned series by six artists, developed, in the Foundation's words, "through sustained curatorial dialogue with six artists across different geographies and contexts."

Luisa Dörr, Latifa AlBokhari and Sathish Kumar use portraiture and close observation "to attend to the nuances of lived experience, tracing the intimate connections between land and memory." Dörr's Escaramuzas follows women riders in Mexico training in charrería; AlBokhari's Sirti Mara (You're a Woman Now), printed on velvet, gathers moments of wedding preparation, jewellery and henna in women's lives in the Gulf; and Kumar's Bond pictures his brother, a Gulf migrant worker in Abu Dhabi, alongside the family house being built in India.

Adam Rouhana, Guanyu Xu and Maheder Haileselassie turn instead towards "absence and rupture". Rouhana's Permission to Narrate, made with a mobile studio across cities of the occupied West Bank, lets sitters shape how they are shown and captions each portrait with name, age, city and occupation. Xu's Resident Aliens layers found and personal images across the walls and furniture of immigrant homes at life size, while Haileselassie's Endinastawis Anirsa (Lest We Forget) builds light-box collages of the Arbegnoch, the Ethiopian resistance fighters who opposed the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941, from archival certificates.

Through large-scale prints, constructed installations and spatial interventions, the works test the conventions of the medium and "blur the boundaries between fact and construction, record and interpretation." The show is curated by Sara Al Mheiri, Assistant Curator, and Osemudiamen Ekore, Curatorial Assistant, at Sharjah Art Foundation.

Vantage Point began in 2013 as an annual open call and now runs as a biennial, with each artist commissioned to develop a single documentary series. This edition, the Foundation says, "situates documentary photography as a field in flux, one defined not by static truths, but by continual discernment."