Founding Research Archive · Retrospective Edition III
To carry a place
Exhibitions held in 2025Research & text: Aili XuPublished 18 August 2026
Three international projects treated place as something mobile: carried through culture, rebuilt through intelligence, or remembered in architecture designed to disappear.
Method
Prepared from official exhibition archives and published retrospectively. These are critical research notes, not a claim of first-hand or contemporaneous review.
What travels when a person moves?
to carry
Sharjah Biennial 16 gathered more than 650 works by nearly 200 participants, including over 200 new commissions, across seventeen venues in the emirate. Its five curators approached “to carry” as an open verb: burden, inheritance, care, movement and survival could remain in tension rather than resolve into a single theme.
The biennial’s geographical spread mattered. Work appeared across Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid and Kalba, making movement part of the encounter rather than a curatorial abstraction. Culture is not transported intact; it is selected, translated and changed by the spaces through which it passes.
Curator Carlo Ratti organised the nineteenth Venice Architecture Biennale around natural, artificial and collective intelligence. Set against a climate under pressure, the exhibition questioned the image of architecture as the product of a singular author. Adaptation instead required collaboration across organisms, technologies, disciplines and communities.
La Biennale reported 298,000 tickets, its highest attendance for an architecture edition. Yet popularity is not proof of resolution. The more important measure is whether “collective” intelligence changes who is heard, or merely enlarges the vocabulary of design.
Marina Tabassum’s pavilion took its cue from the Bengal delta, where rivers shift and dwellings move. Architecture in such a landscape cannot rely on permanence; it survives through adjustment, recollection and stories of lived space. The elongated structure and central court translated that understanding into a temporary building in Kensington Gardens.
The pavilion’s restraint challenged the expectation that temporary architecture must announce itself as an icon. A structure destined to be removed could still carry a place—not by reproducing Bengal in London, but by bringing a knowledge of instability into a setting that often treats the ground beneath architecture as fixed.