The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 5: Hoor Al Qasimi

What if we could create spaces of solidarity, communication, and support? This time we explore the passions and multiple projects of the President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, Hoor Al Qasimi. She established the Foundation in 2009 as a catalyst and advocate for the arts, not only in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates but also in the wider region and around the world.  She was originally on her way to becoming an artist, but now says she doesn’t think she’d have succeeded because she has trouble “focusing on one thing. Hence the multiple jobs.” We talk about the round of generic art fairs - which, in Hoor’s words “hurt her eyes” - and what it would be like if we were liberated enough NOT to have to follow the market. What if we trusted our intuition and spent more time with - and getting to know - emerging artists? Enjoy!

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is the podcast all about imagining different ways of doing things.

[Audio of guests]

In this episode, we talk to Hoor Al Qasimi, who—unusually—seems equally able to imagine new futures as she does to actually build them. What if we write our own histories? What if we create the change we seek?  

Under her watch, Sharjah has become one of the most influential centers for cultural creation and research in the Global South. From revamping art biennials to creating new universities, overseeing architectural triennials, running a fashion house, sitting on international museum boards, curating large and small-scale artist projects on every continent, Hoor Al Qasimi is perhaps one of the busiest people we have ever interviewed. A self-confessed workaholic who seems to move through the world aware that one lifetime won’t be enough to get everything done.

At the heart of all of this is art, and Hoor’s profound belief in its essential ability to change us as people, and her insistence that this needs to be done by working together.  

I really appreciate how open Hoor is and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do too. 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining us. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you for inviting me.

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to take you back to 2003. You, as the youngest daughter of the Sheikh [Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi], took over the Sharjah Biennial and staged something of a kind of artistic coup d'etat, age just 22. And you said to your father, “I just want to look around. I'm not going to interfere.” And then you of course did. And a lot of people quit. There were a lot of naysayers. You said, “A lot of the older male artists didn't like my ideas and they promptly left.” And you totally had a different vision. And I just thought it was really fascinating that this young woman would have this confidence really to come into an organization and say, “I'm going to just do this differently.”

Did you know what you were getting yourself in for? And where did that come from?

Hoor Al Qasimi: No, I had no clue. I've had some journalists ask me before, “Oh, what is it like being an Arab woman curator,” and I've said, “My father never told me that as a woman, I couldn't do this or, as a boy, they could do that.” It wasn't like that. We didn't have those kinds of limitations in terms of our profession or ambition. My father is a great model. He works a lot and has been supporting culture for the longest time. 

I grew up with Sharjah Biennial. It meant so much to me. It's really what made me want to be an artist. I was going to study architecture and my art teacher in school said, “You're going to end up building towers in Dubai. You're an artist, and you should go to art school.” So I always put myself in the position of what an artist would look for as a young artist growing up.

I went to documenta with my father [who was] on a cultural visit in Germany and he said, “I'm going to go to mines. It's not so interesting for you. You stay in Berlin. It's more fun.” I was talking to Britta Schmidt, who was chief curator at Hamburger Bahnhof [- Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart], and she said you should go to documenta, and I'd never heard of documenta. I'd never been to any biennial outside of Sharjah, but it really influenced me. It made me realize that suddenly I could see myself in these exhibitions. 

Going to art school at the Slade [School of Fine Art] in the UK in the late 90s, you still didn't see things that represented you. There was one tutor who would say, “Oh, your work is not very Islamic.” So already you're getting a stereotype just for being brown or just for being Arab, I know a lot of the Chinese and Japanese students also got that…

Charlotte Burns: Wow.

Hoor Al Qasimi: …and as women as well. So it was a double thing. I didn't feel it growing up here as a woman that I had limitations, but I felt it in the West. So it was very interesting and opened my eyes. 

So when I visited documenta and I saw that there were works about apartheid South Africa and Palestine, and it was more about a thematic, a concept, artists weren't divided by their countries. I just started, thinking about it and I said, I was just interested because I was on a gap year. I was going back to do my painting degree at the Royal Academy [of Arts]. So obviously I wasn't planning on working at that stage. And the artists who were involved, some of them, may they rest in peace, they were just so used to the program the way it was. Everybody would invite their friends and it was always the same crowd and I just feel like they couldn't be bothered with the changes. And I remember a lot of artists were a little bit angry with me. I got attacked a little bit in the press for making such a big change. But I've worked with all of them again and I think they understand what I was trying to do and how I was trying to make those changes. And it's been 20 years now, so it's good to see how far we've come. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: A little bit of vindication, in 20 years. 

I want to unpick that a little bit because you were never taught that you had to think of yourself as being limited. And then when you went to London to art school, which thinks of itself as a progressive part of the world, that's when you were taught that you needed to be limited, which I don't think is how the Western art world thinks of itself.

So I wondered if you could go into those two things. What if art can be both extremely limiting—in the ways that maybe parts of it think of itself, define itself—and what if it can be the opposite? What if it can be an epiphany?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I wouldn't say that we were without limitations. There were certain things that we weren't allowed to do, but it was more because of your place in society. My parents were very much about education so we had school and then we had tutors after school and tutors on the weekend. That's the childhood that we had. It was just my parents trying to push the best education for us so that we could be successful. Of course, that meant that there wasn't enough time to go out and party, which is fine. That's probably why people know me now that I don't really like to party, I prefer to work. 

But in terms of the West, there wasn't as much diversity as there is now. We didn't see ourselves represented as largely as we do now. You could see it in terms of the history of exhibitions during that time; all of the professors, probably 99% white male artists. It was very important to put myself in that position and realize, what if there are possibilities to change things? And when I was in documenta, it was the same kind of thing. Why does one have to go to a place in Germany that's not even that well known, to see this art about the world? What about people in my part of the world who don't have the means to travel? How could we bridge this conversation and look at things from our point of view?

My father's known to be a historian and writer, trying to write history from our point of view because we've gotten so used to our history being written by the British. My father's first dissertation, he has two PhDs, the first one was the myth of Arab piracy in the Gulf. When the British wanted to gain control of the region, they called our family pirates. So my father's first book was really to disprove that, with all the evidence and facts and footnotes, et cetera. It's again about writing your history or maybe expressing yourselves from your point of view. And as you put yourself in a position of a brown or Arab woman, you're already on that side where you need to write your history because it's not written for you.

Charlotte Burns: Did it feel for you like a sense of closure or a sense of full cycle, having done that last biennale, having curated it, in the sense of Okwui Enwezor handing over to you? Having begun being so inspired by documenta, did that feel like a sense of a chapter ending?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, it was interesting because when I thought of Okwui, I couldn't get him out of my head. I invited him pretty early, in 2018. Okwui was so supportive and he was an inspiration. But he didn't have that much put in place at the time because he was in hospital a lot. And I remember the last conversation I had with him in the hospital and I just said, “I really need to know what to do.” And he said, “You do it.” And I thought that he wanted me to do his show. So I quickly put together a working group. Then I realized when he said you do it, he always spoke about how I know our audience, I know our place and I felt it was this trust to say, you do it. 

So what I wanted to do is bring artists who I work with, artists that Okwui's worked with, and try to do something that could be more of a collaboration. There was only one artist that Okwui actually had invited and another name that was written down. So it was really my decision to navigate and see what made sense. 

For the longest period, I wanted to de-center the biennial. That's why I kept using different towns and villages around Sharjah. I went for five cities. I wanted six. The team were like, “No way.”  I'm still trying for the next one. It's this town, they need us because we have little art centers in each town that teach drawing and sculpture, ceramics. So it was very important for me to not do a token project, but actually have a substantial amount of work.

I wouldn't call it a cycle, but it was certainly a moment. There's a lot that you feel after 20 years. I saw how far we've come in terms of a foundation. I couldn't have done it without the team, from the hospitality team to the guys organizing the buses for everyone. They're so calm. We had over 11,500 people on the opening day. And I don't know how everyone managed, but it's such a great energy because it's a collective project, the biennial and you feel it. Yeah, so I don't know if it's about closing a chapter.  I think it's just opening a second chapter.

Charlotte Burns: That's what I mean. Just marking the end of a moment, moving into another one. But to have an epiphany at a young age and then be told by the curator of that exhibition, you go and do this, having already done it for 20 years, and then curate an exhibition that is raved about by people up and down the art world is pretty monumental, in terms of an achievement.

Hoor Al Qasimi: I always say that if you want to make change, then you have to be part of that change. You can't sit and wait for things. So for the world to change, you have to make an effort because nobody is going to know what you need if you don't try, if you don't open your mouth, if you don't say, “Actually, this is the kind of thing that we are interested in doing.” 

Putting yourself in that position is very important. And a lot of artists, Michael Armitage, Ibrahim Mahama, Yinka Shonibare, all of them going home and opening up spaces. I just said to them, it's the same idea. It's just, I didn't wait to be a successful artist. I just jumped on the first opportunity I got but we all have the same ambition. Theaster Gates, everybody, we want to create space for other artists, and we want to do that at home, and I feel it more and more seeing artists creating their spaces.

I had that conversation with Doris Salcedo about her space in Bogotá as well as Maria Magdalena [Campos-Pons] about her creating this project in Matanzas. That's the beauty of people making the change and opening opportunities.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I guess there was something in you that knew that you wanted to do that. Let's focus on where you are, which is Sharjah. For people who haven't been, it's the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. 

Your father, the ruler since 1972, taking over since his brother was assassinated. He's been a huge supporter of culture himself saying it is essential for the spirit. In a speech he gave in 1979, he told an audience that it was time to stop a concrete revolution of civil construction and replace it with a cultural revolution. 

Very early in his reign, he began supporting an artistic avant-garde, opening museums and launching the Sharjah Biennial—which you would then take over the reins of—and you would pay homage to the artists that he fostered when you gave a presentation in the 2015 Venice Biennale of some of those artists. So it's a long family lineage of building an artistic tradition. 

So let's talk a little bit about that because the consistency is so key and we're seeing that through the lineage of father, daughter, moving forward through these generations. So, what if we do write our own histories as a longstanding practice?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think my father likes it when I interfere. It's just like a running joke. Everybody thinks that it's a private foundation, but it's a government foundation. So I'm actually just a staff member, so I have no rights to anything at the foundation except that I've left my blood, sweat, and tears in it for 20 years of my life.

So for me, it is personal, but at the same time, I have to keep stressing that it's a public foundation. It's not private money, it's public money. So it's for the public and it's really important for us to put the public at the forefront. In this biennial, after 20 years, I'm really seeing the difference of people who used to come and participate in workshops with us as children who are now working with us as staff members or our artists or audience members. So it takes time to see that growth. It's not a part of the UAE, it's just the Sharjah government, so it's much easier to navigate and be creative. 

I have to say that my father has given me a lot of space to experiment.

Charlotte Burns: You've said that the goal from the beginning has been to create a platform that enables South-South exchange. You said, “In the past, many organizations have relied on Western institutions to determine their future. So it's important to create spaces that encourage conversations and permit us to write our own history. This has been the guiding principle.” 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think what has happened with the Sharjah Biennial is that we've opened up the space for many histories to be written and I do talk about like South-South conversation. It doesn't mean that the West is excluded, but it just means it's a different viewpoint or a different angle to perceive things, because as you see now, a lot of the history and everything that's been written, the way we've all grown up, has come from Western thinking. And you see it in the news, in social media, there's a big issue with that now. 

People are waking up, realizing that they have a voice and that they need to use it. And many spaces are popping up all over the world, and it's great for us to work together and come together and be in solidarity, to support a lot of artists who are not able to show in many places in the world.

Charlotte Burns: Just to take that a little further, tell me what you mean.

Hoor Al Qasimi: I'll give you an example. When we're creating our structure for our foundation, there are many institutions who would come from, let's say, the US or the UK to say, “This is how a museum should function.” We've realized that some things work, some things don't work. As people we’re very different. And it was the same when I was working with people in different parts of the world who are trying to organize their own structure. Sometimes they end up having advisors coming from the West telling them, “This is what you need.” And then I would come in and say, “You don't need to think in that way.” Look at your audience, your public, your culture, and you need to tell us or them what you need. 

So I think that's the difference. The idea of not always thinking that art or culture could be transported and that the same thing has to happen all over the world. No, there's a beauty in how different we are, and we need to embrace that. And that's why different cultures and spaces are exciting because we are different, but we need to come together with missions and values that are similar.

Charlotte Burns: I think that's really interesting. Often, when you hear people lamenting art these days, you realize that the people saying this are speaking from art market centers about art market art. And as someone who is so often looking beyond that, you travel a lot, but you are not someone who's necessarily going to every single art fair. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, so it depends. I don't like to go to art fairs as much because as a curator, I have to say it hurts my eyes to see art crammed in that way. So I do find it visually disturbing. Really, it does stress me out but if I need to be there because I'm speaking or because of an event, then I will go. 

Charlotte Burns: They’re still useful to go to for other reasons but when people lament about the art being made today, I often wonder if they're lamenting the places that they're seeing it from. And I imagine that you're probably seeing art more broadly than that. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I completely agree with you. There's nothing wrong with an art fair. It's just that not everybody who works in art has to follow the market. I still don't understand the market. I don't know. I'm not good at that part and I don't have to be. That's not my job. 

I think there's room for everyone in the art world. There's room for a fair because artists need to sell. People need to live and produce their work. We need patrons and supporters to help us fund projects for biennials. So it is a network, but what's great is that you don't have to be a know-it-all and be part of every single part of that scene. 

I try to do as many studio visits as possible. For example, I was traveling in Central South America for a while, and somebody asked me to go visit an artist in the Peruvian Amazon in Pucallpa, so I went to visit this artist there. So I will make an effort to see artists because I think it's important to spend time with the artist in their studio, get to know them, get to know the practice and it's not about shopping basket, putting works together. That's really important because it's about the relationships that you build. There has to be a trust.

Charlotte Burns: Some of the artists that, when I've been researching that, people have said they've really enjoyed working with you because you've given them space. They felt like you understood the practice, that it would have time and space. And that you had generous budgets, and that things were being done properly. And another artist was like, “I don't know how she found me. She reached out to me on Instagram and.” How do you find the time for that? You have 17 jobs and you're the director of different organizations. I know that your parents had you working a lot in the evenings or weekends. Is that how you're doing it? You're just working 20 hours a day.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Kind of, yeah. I'm very curious person. I trust my instincts a lot because my instincts are what got me my job. If I didn't go visit documenta, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I learned to listen to my instincts. 

For example, the artist that I went to see in Pucallpa was mentioned to me three times. So I thought, “Okay, it's no coincidence. So I thought that means I need to go and see her. So I listen to these moments. I'm not a spiritual person, but I do trust my instincts. And if something doesn't happen, I try not to force it.

Charlotte Burns: You say you're not a spiritual person. What is it that propels you?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think I'm a stubborn person. That's for sure. I've been known to be stubborn. If I want to do something, then I'll put all my energy to make it happen. 

For example, budgets for Sharjah Biennial 15. I fundraised like crazy for that biennial. And artists helped me. Doris Salcedo's project was funded by Glenstone Museum. Without their support, it wouldn't have been possible. A lot of the artists helped us get support for projects like Bouchra Khalili's work, we had multiple partners, LUMA [Arles]and MACBA  [Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art]. Partnerships are also very important. 

The reason I pushed the biennial by two extra years, we basically missed a year. We needed more time, not only to fundraise but also for artists to produce the work and for our team to be able to put the project together. We do everything in-house in Sharjah. We have a full team. We're over 300 people at the foundation. We do all the AV, technology, carpentry, production. So it was really important to create a team that you can trust and work together and a lot of them, we've been working together for 20 years or so.

Charlotte Burns: I know you think collaboratively. Do you also think competitively? I know you think competitively with yourself. Do you think competitively with other people, other countries, other museums?

Hoor Al Qasimi: No, I am competitive with myself for sure. I always want to try to do better than I did. I have to say I do that mainly with weightlifting. When I lift weights. I want to go heavier each time. But I don't like competition. I think it's important to work together because at the end of the day, you have more possibilities when you come together. And I don't like the feeling of competitiveness. I think it's a generational thing. A lot of us don't want to compete anymore. We love working together. We like sharing resources. 

For example, you'd see artists in every single biennial around the world, and they're always pushed to do new work. That's really not sustainable also for the artists and their practice. So it was very important that when we co-produced Isaac Julien's project with the Barnes Foundation, it was supposed to premiere at Sharjah and then go to Barnes. But we postponed the biennial by an extra year and Isaac said, “But it won't premiere in Sharjah.” And I said, “Isaac, I really don't care.” For me, it's not about who shows it first. It's about the project being ready and possible. And a lot of people who are competitive used to think, “We have to premiere this work. It has to show here first.” And I don't think that is important.

Charlotte Burns: You're the president of the International Biennial Association and you've spoken a lot about this idea of pooling resources, collaborating more, and biennials being more mindful of creating opportunities for the next generation. What if biennials operated differently? Not only more sustainably for artists, for audiences, for each other, but I'm thinking also about what it is that Okwui always said about biennales, that at their best they can do what nothing else in the art world can do. They can do more than any museum exhibition can do.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I agree 100%, and I think that's also why Okwui was very supportive of our platform. The International Biennial Association, it's a small association. I'm the second president. It's a network. It doesn't include every biennial in the world but what's great is that it's a network for members to see how biennials can be this change, know more about each other, find a space that you know, we sometimes have similar concerns or situations we find ourselves in. So how can we help each other? 

Recently we've also opened up for emerging biennials to come on board. I don't think there is one model and there shouldn't be a model. That's the difference between biennials and museums. You can be flexible and you could really cater to who your audience is. But at the forefront, it should be artists and public. And of course, you have to also look after your team. 

Charlotte Burns: You said there's a generation of us that thinks differently. Who do you count as your peers? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I could say generation but it's broad. In our network at the Biennial Association, we work with Berlin [Biennale]. Gabriele Horn has been really crucial. Sally Tallant, who's left us for the Queens Museum, we miss her all the time. It's important that we learn from each other. I was on the board of MoMA PS1 for 11 years. I'm on the board of Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, I learn a lot from Christine Tohmé, who runs that, Darat Al Funun in Amman. 

But it's very important that we have these spaces where we can ask each other questions and bring in our experiences. In our advisory committee there, we have Emily Jacir, Zeina Arida, many people who are running different institutions, and we’re all going through different things. But at the same time, we're able to speak openly about our limitations and our struggles. I think that's very important. And you can't do that if you're in a competitive mode.

Charlotte Burns: What do you think are the biggest challenges people are facing right now?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think the biggest challenges everyone is facing is the situation artists being canceled or disinvited. Academics, lecturers, people being fired in the art world. I think it's become very sensitive about what people could talk about or not talk about. And it's created such a disconnect. Suddenly people are seeing two sides to the art world. People that can control the situation because they can pull funding out and the other side who are allowing artists to express themselves. 

I know many people who got disinvited just for being Palestinian or just being Arab and it's quite disheartening because at the same time, the art world wants to connect. People want to be together, and want to share in our missions and values, but more and more we're seeing the disconnect and maybe that's because of where the power lies in certain institutions.

Charlotte Burns: Do you see a way forward?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think it's important for people to speak and listen. A lot of times people are ready to cancel things without understanding the situation. It's not black and white. I think for people to be vilified because they call for a ceasefire, I think is ridiculous. If anything, it seems like there's a lot of inequality, where certain lives are worth more than other lives. And you’d think that after Black Lives Matter, that people would be more open to understanding where the limitations are or where the failures have been, but we're not seeing that. 

And it's also to do with the different changes in governments around the world. The way things are shifting in different countries, in the Netherlands and Argentina. It's quite frightening that there could be that much control in terms of the art world and culture. The cuts that are going through culture. The racism that you see blatantly all over. 

I see the solution is that we need to come together, like I mentioned, about solidarity and get to know each other and work together. That's really the main goal for me, supporting artists who are finding themselves in this situation. 

But I think people are speaking up now, the world is very connected. You can't open up social media without hearing something that has happened and people either supporting each other or attacking each other, but there isn't the excuse of we don't know anymore.

Charlotte Burns: You've had to navigate politics through the biennial. You've said, “We've never been shy about showing art that's political because our region is surrounded by politics,” and you think art is one of the areas that can handle this because it's one of the few places we can have those conversations. It's harder and harder to have a space where we can come together, but you believe art can push people to contemplate certain questions. 

Have you seen through the 20 years of doing the biennial that different conversations can be held? Because Western commentators on the biennial in Sharjah tend to focus on the social and political conditions of the region, including restrictions, for instance, around workers' rights or legislation around homosexuality. How do you navigate those issues? Legislation hasn't changed, but have conversations?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, for sure. Society is very different from what people see as legally acceptable. People live their lives. Everyone's relationship is very private here. If you're heterosexual, homosexual, nobody asks you. Everybody's personal life is very private. But at the same time, there are conversations around youth and friends and people, it's normalized. It's not something that is seen in the same way that the West kind of enforced their stereotype of what needs to happen if you are homosexual, “this is how you need to behave,” because it's the way people behave within our culture in general, even if you're heterosexual or homosexual. There's a cultural way of being. 

I think, for example, certain works looking at workers' rights, we've shown in many biennials. We have also listened to any criticisms or discussions around Gulf labor. There are a lot of the artists who were part of Gulf labor who I've worked with. So I think it's important that culture can be this space of opening up conversation and it's a gentle way of doing it. It's not a way to alienate anyone, but let's just have this conversation and see what we can do. 

The biennial when we opened 20 years ago, it was around the war in Iraq, and everybody said to me, “Are you going to cancel?” Because the American troops had just marched into Iraq. And I said, “No, it's more important that we do this exhibition,” and it's a type of solidarity of coming together. 

We also have exhibitions throughout the year. It's not just the biennial. And now we have an exhibition looking at Palestine through the works in our collection at Sharjah Art Foundation's collection. But it's not only an exhibition, it's also a space where people can gather and speak. Sharjah has a huge Palestinian community, including staff members who work with us from Gaza. So it's very important that people are able to find the space to speak to each other, come together, find solidarity.

I have a great team. We're different ages, very open to listening to their feedback because I'm busy with whatever I'm doing, traveling around the world and working but I also need to listen to how people react to certain things and what they're looking for. But you have to listen to your audience.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Sharjah Art Foundation as well. You just announced the programs for 2024, including the first major survey, the late Pakistani artist and women's rights activist, Lala Rukh, the superstar artist that you're telling the world about. You do lots of pioneering things like this bringing attention to artists that people don't know about. Your ambitions just seem to grow. Once you've got a handle on the biennial, you expanded into the foundation, which is a year-round platform. Then in 2018, you set up the Africa Institute with Salah [M.] Hassan, which is separate from the foundation. It's a think tank for African studies. You are doing the triennial in Japan next year. You also have taken over your late twin brother's fashion label. You're a restauranteur…

Hoor Al Qasimi: I have a way of not starting things from scratch, let's say. With the Africa Institute, really people who know me know that I have a reputation for saving old buildings and renovating them and repurposing them, hence also the Sharjah Architecture Triennial that I set up in 2019. So it was very important for me to do a lot of research about these buildings and I started asking questions about the Africa Hall. Why was it that we grew up with a hall called Africa Hall? It was built in 1976 and the first conference was on African-Arab relations that my father had organized. I spoke with Salah Hassan, who I've worked with on many exhibitions, he looked at the African Studies Association Journal from 1976 and found the original report on the Sharjah Conference. There was a recommendation to set up an institute. So 40 years later, I suggested setting up this institute by looking at African Diaspora Studies and hired Salah Hassan to be the director. But I was also interested in setting up an Asia Institute because of our relationship with Asia. Half our population is South Asian. We have people living here for generations from Central Asia to South Asia. 

When we were working on the accreditation for a master's PhD program it made more sense to create an umbrella organization again. So we recently, last year, launched the Global Studies University in Sharjah, which will be the umbrella for the Africa Institute, Asia Institute, and others that I'm also in the process of working on. It's an idea to create this other way of looking at universities and academia from a different point of view where you're not limited in terms of your research because you're not looking at it from a certain geography. 

Our connections with Africa are very historic and very deep so there are things that we're able to do from this part of the world that make more sense. Our relationship with Sudan, with Zanzibar, the Indian Ocean. So it's really interesting that there's this space to navigate and work together. A lot of people are interested in collaborating with us. So yeah, watch the space.

Charlotte Burns: So what if you re-imagine academia as well, while you're at it?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I think so because there are, for me, for us, even for my father, when we spoke about the Africa Institute, it's really important that it's about collaborating with universities on the continent as well. So our first collaboration was with Addis Ababa University. It's really exciting and interesting.

I think it's really important that we create these spaces again, not just for the artists, but also the curators as well. 

Charlotte Burns: What is the Asia Institute? Where's that going to focus? Asia is enormous.

Hoor AL Qasimi: Asia is very enormous. It will be from our part of the world, Western Asia, all the way to the very east, the north and south. This is the idea of really looking at it diversely and geographically, and its widest span and not focusing on what people might consider Asia to be.

Charlotte Burns: Tell me a little more. What does that mean? I'm trying to wrap my head around that. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Our part of the world is known as Western Asia. 

Charlotte Burns: This is all so interesting. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Because the Middle East is a colonial term that a lot of people don't like to use.

Charlotte Burns: So the Africa Institute is going to be part of this entity looking at the same sort of things, this idea of patterns of migration. Water rights, civic studies, histories, futures.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yes, all the institutes or centers around the Global Studies University would be looking at mainly social sciences and humanities, but also what was very important for me was to set up the language center. I'm obsessed with languages.

Charlotte Burns: You speak eight languages, is that it? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Seven, I'm rusty in all of them right now. I'm going to blame Covid and brain fog. But language is very important for me so I wanted to establish the language center at the Africa Institute. So we already teaching, Hausa, Kiswahili [also known as Swahili], Amharic, and Arabic. And of course, there will be more languages as we grow.

Charlotte Burns: You're going to be in Japan quite a bit this year. You're going to be the first, non-Japanese artistic director of the Aichi [Triennale]. Congratulations.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you very much. Yeah, it's great since I studied Japanese 20 years ago, so trying to put it to good use now. The team is wonderful, and whenever I do a biennial or triennial somewhere, I really try to work with the local team. 

I also am working on a small artist-run biennial in Matanzas in Cuba founded by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons. So I've visited a few times and trying to work mainly on socially engaged projects, working with local artists as much as possible. 

Charlotte Burns: For Japan, can you tell us a bit more about the concept?

Hoor Al Qasimi: The title that I've chosen is A Time Between Ashes and Roses. It's from a poem by Adonis, a Syrian poet, that was written about the 1967 war. What I really liked about the poem is it starts off with, “How do wither trees blossom a time between ashes and roses is coming when everything shall be extinguished when everything shall begin again.” So this idea of what happens to Earth and to the planet after destruction. 

My interest is really about the relationship between people and the environment. It could be through war, it could be through extraction, it could be through over-farming or overfishing or so this kind of depletion of resources. But the way I wanted to look at it was to look at the relationship on two extremes. So one being a relationship that is harmonious, almost fairytale-like, where you can imagine plants and animals and humans living in harmony. To the other extreme science fiction, apocalyptic, the end of the world destruction. Just trying to look at these two extremes and how, also through science fiction, we can imagine a renewal. So it's a cycle of destruction and renewal. 

So it's been interesting. I don't know how it's gonna be realized. We have some great artists working there, but I'm also finding some interesting references within Aichi in Japan that I'm interested in looking at. And that opens on the 13th of September 2025.

Charlotte Burns: You are nothing if not a busy person. You so fulfill the criteria of a ‘what if.’ You are doing so many things that exist in that space of imagining, what if renewal, what if destruction, what if we could build a university structure that re-imagined what it meant? What if a Biennale operated differently? What if we rewrote our own histories? 

Which of those ‘what ifs,’ if you had to grab one and run, if you could only focus on one tomorrow for the rest of your life, which one would you focus on?

Hoor Al Qasimi: In terms of my job or in terms of ‘what if’?

Charlotte Burns: In terms of your energy. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: It's a very hard question because I would, what I would do is I would create a third umbrella organization and I would put everything under that one umbrella organization and focus on that. 

Charlotte Burns: You can’t do that! 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think both the Architecture Triennial, the Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Sharjah Art Foundation are very dear to me, I have to say. And with my brother's fashion label, it's his legacy that I have to finish. But I guess Sharjah Art Foundation has been my longest-running job. 20 years. So that's something that would be very hard to live without for sure.

Charlotte Burns: Do you still find that as exciting as you did?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, for sure. Not only because of the biennial, but because of the team I'm working with right now, it's been really great listening to them. Our team is growing to include things that I was hoping to do. Now our music department is doing very well. We have our performance festival. Good things always take time and I think there's always this way of not over-planning as well because you don't know what's going to happen.

The reason ‘what if’ works for me is that you can do that with a biennial where you can't do it at certain institutions. There is more flexibility: what if we didn't build it in this way? What if we just use the space as a shell? What would happen?

Charlotte Burns: Do you see yourself staying in that role? Can you imagine giving it over to someone else to do?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I will have to eventually, but I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I do threaten my team with my retirement sometimes when I'm exhausted and they just laugh and say, “You'll never retire.” But what I've done now is we're many directors on the team, different positions and that's been really great. What I want is people to be able to make decisions and take decisions and be in positions of authority.  I am involved in everything, but I don't want to micromanage. I want to give them the space to grow and also be proud of the work that they do and yeah, and they've helped me a lot. If they weren't there, I wouldn't be able to do Japan and Tunis and everything else.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Right now I'm trying to fundraise for the project in Matanzas, and that's keeping me up at night. That's been a bit of a struggle. And the ‘what if’ that gets me up in the morning is that there's not enough time in the day.

Charlotte Burns: What is the change that you want now to create? What are you focusing on the most? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: It's not about me creating a change, I just feel speaking to each other is so important, and listening and creating these spaces where people can find similarities or share their issues and problems. I think that's important and it's happened in many places. More and more we are sharing, we're collaborating on exhibitions with partners and touring. For me, that's what is really important.

Charlotte Burns: What if you could go back to 22-year-old you starting out saying, “I'm not going to interfere, but let me just look at this.” What advice would you give her? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Run! Stick to painting! 

[Laughs]

No, I don't know. I don't think I would have been a successful artist, I have to say, just because I think I've got, I'm not diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I've got ADHD. I have problems focusing on one thing. Hence, the multiple jobs and umbrellas and not being able to stay in one place long enough. 

But, I don't know what I would say. I think I felt at that time that I got a lot of criticism, not criticism, but there was always a stereotype was, “Oh, it's only because you're the daughter of and you're a woman and you're a painter and you're 22.” So I was very insecure. I felt that I couldn't put myself in a position as director. Nobody would take me seriously as a painter, 22, woman, Arab. 

So I struggled when I went back to the Royal Academy. I realized that maybe I need to change my degree and get a master's in curating contemporary art. And I remember Teresa Gleadall saying, “But you don't need this degree.” And I said, “But yeah, I do need it,” because I feel like I'm always going to be stereotyped, always going to be judged. I wasn't confident in my position, and for the longest time, I wasn't. And I guess when I was invited to join the MoMA PS1 board, I found myself around a lot of curators who treated me as equals and I realized that “Oh, okay, they respect my work.” Even from Glenn Lowry to Peter Eleey and Klaus Biesenbach, everybody who was there, Laura Hoffman. So a lot of them made me feel equal, I would say, when it's always been, you haven't, I didn't feel that way so much in the West. And now, 20 years later, the work kind of speaks for itself. You like it or you don't like it. It doesn't really matter. This is the work.

Charlotte Burns: Did you need that? That Western validation? Do you think? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I mean now I say to people, “We don’t need your Western validation,” but at the time I just, I think I was young, that's the thing. I was young and there isn't a handbook on how to direct a biennial or how to curate a biennial and maybe that's the beauty of it. As an artist, you're coming into it from a different point of view. I don't know if there is any degree or course that prepares you for anything like this. 

I still have my moments when I'm insecure, when I think, “Oh, I should have a PhD.” And, I got an honorary degree and my parents are like, “Oh, it doesn't count.” So there's so much of this kind of ambition, but there's no time really. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: Are they proud of you?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah. Yeah. They say it sometimes, but I think my mom, she meets people around the world who suddenly say, “I saw your daughter's interview on RTE or I saw this or,” so they see the change that happens. 

My father is also very proud that the work is very political because we learned a lot of that from my father. He marched with Muhammed Ali in Chicago in the early eighties. And he was very much part of a lot of movements for equal rights and he was friends with Nelson Mandela and it's really important. 

That is also part of the way we think about things. Yesterday we were talking about something with my mom and dad and I said something about working with musicians or people in the Sahara desert and looking at people from different parts of the world. And my mother just said to my dad, “Just like our father.” So that was really interesting.

But I'm also using my father's network when I'm working. For example, the artist, the older generation of artists in Sudan, the relationship we have with Sudan was from my father's generation. There's a hall at the university called Sharjah Hall in Khartoum. So I'm only always just building up on some of these relationships to make them more relevant for our generation but then at the same time, I'm working with Maori artists in New Zealand and Aboriginal artists in Australia. So it's a little bit of both.

Charlotte Burns: Such a process. It's a giant ‘what if’ building all these futures. That idea of the present and the future coming so much from the past.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yes, for sure.

Charlotte Burns: Oh, this has been such an interesting conversation. All that’s left for me to do is say thank you so much and good luck with everything that you have on your plate. I better let you go because I feel like you have a plane to catch or something similar. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you very much. Thank you.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Such an inspiring conversation—and what a work ethic! Thank you so much to Hoor Al Qasimi.

Next time we’ll be joined by the Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn.

Jarl Mohn: I’ve always found that if I’m struggling with a question in business or something, I love to go to see art that I don't know, art that I'm not familiar with and it’s like a kick in the head. It helps me open my eyes.

Charlotte Burns: Do join us. It’s such an interesting conversation. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.