The Proposal as a Publication Format

Majzoub was invited to participate by Zeynep Öz, one of 5 curators of SB16, whom he had known for more than a decade but “hadn’t worked together yet,” Majzoub said. “She’s someone that is very interested in publication as a format, especially in experimental publication.” Majzoub said that she reached out to him specifically about a work that he began doing in 2019, called streetschool. “Streetschool started as a reaction to being commissioned to create a large piece with a budget that couldn’t actually cover the cost. I became very curious about this process—something artists, not just me, have been navigating for a long time. There’s often a quick curatorial ambition, but only a little money to realize it.” Each iteration of streetschool after that invited a group of people to learn from each other, and produces, collectively, a shared landscape to host this learning process.

The first iteration of streetschool was commissioned for How to Reappear: Through the Quivering Leaves of Independent Publishing curated by Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis (Kayfa-ta) at Beirut Art Center in 2019.  The How to Reappear exhibition and research project explored the often overlooked and significant role of independent publishing practices by examining how independent publishers question dominant norms, create alternative forms of publishing, and resist the mainstream. The project highlighted marginalized genres, formats, and voices, showcasing a diverse range of historical and contemporary reflections on these practices.

Given that the exhibition itself was focused on publication, Majzoub told them, “I want to make a proposal as a publication format.” He explains that “artists spend more time making proposals than making work, so exploring the proposal as a public form is interesting to consider.” Majzoub gathered his usual collaborators. For this project, however, what they would do differently is that they would split the money equally amongst themselves and any additional expenses towards the project would come from that pool, making everyone’s compensation equally less. “We would need to steal, hunt, scavenge… whatever to build this thing I kept calling a school. And every time anyone needed to buy something, everyone’s salary went down. It created this unique kind of relationship where everyone is responsible for each other’s compensation; an understanding that the value they’re being paid is not for individual contributions, but rather for their collaboration.”

Majzoub explained that Lebanon, at that time, was going through a “garbage crisis” where the political elite was not taking responsibility for the mess “and no one ended up picking up the trash, and in a way, this process mirrored the resource mismanagement in the art world, where you have a lot of money to make work, but not enough money to pay those who make it.”

Intrigued by the collaborative nature of Majzoub’s work, Öz wanted to explore how this installation would function within the context of one of the galleries she was setting up as part of the biennial, and asked if he would be willing to show that piece, “Problem was: it was thrown back into the trash right after the show years ago.” Both agreed that in order for Majzoub to create a version of streetschool for Sharjah, he would need to contextualize it just as he did with previous iterations in Abu Dhabi and Amman. He stresses that with these types of projects, he doesn’t come in with a prescription as an artist; rather, he meets with the production team and they figure the project out together. “I told them, ‘We need to make this for free,’ and their team was incredible. They mentioned they were renovating buildings from the seventies for the Sharjah Art Foundation, and that leftover bricks and materials were just lying there—a gold mine.”

Marissa Friedman: What was it like managing this project from afar?

Raafat Majzoub: Usually, I’m very hands-on with projects like this. This time, they sent me something like a bill of quantities—but for architectural trash. My team helped me visualize the project based on what they had, and we started building it together, back and forth. I intentionally left gaps in the designs because I wanted the masons to contribute to how it was built, rather than prescribing everything. That’s something I often do—leaving parts incomplete so that collaboration, even unofficially, becomes part of the work.

What surprised me was how they related to the project regardless of me. They didn’t see me as the “owner” of the work, and in some ways, it felt like they knew it better than I did—because they were there, and they built it. I felt a kind of alienation from it, but in a way that was interesting. It’s not a feeling I usually have with my work. I haven’t fully processed it yet, but it’s something that stayed with me.

MF: Can you elaborate more on this shared ownership through process?

RM: I wasn’t there during the construction. All of the decisions—the way the bricks were stacked, the rhythms and techniques—came from the masons themselves. They just got the brief, and they built it. So in terms of labor logic, I had no direct input. And that’s very interesting to me, because if you think about it, I was like the most luxurious artist: this guy who just lands after the work is done, and yet I’m the one speaking about labor. I love the tension in that. It’s a provocation, even for my own practice—because I have to reconcile the fact that this is a project in a biennial that uses found materials, but my presence in its making was absent.

This kind of negotiation isn’t new for me. It also happened in the first iteration of Streetschool. Even when I was there physically, the mode of collaboration was never “let’s do this.” It was always: “let’s test this.” We’d try something, everyone would give their opinion, and then we would decide collectively where to go next. As I kept doing these projects, I realized this is actually what the work is about. It’s not about ending up in a gallery, even though it always does. The real audience for me is the laborers—the people building it.

Streetschool is about mutual learning. It’s not about a curriculum; the school is the school. The act of building together becomes the negotiation needed for learning. That’s it. When the building stops, it can be used for exhibitions, but the real work happens in the exchanges that unfold during the making. What visitors see at the biennial is more like proof that this process happened—but the project itself isn’t for them. It’s for the people who made it. And that’s what keeps it interesting for me, thinking about alternative systems and forms of education.

MF: You mentioned that you were at a remove from this work. What does it feel like to be an audience to your own work?

RM: It’s weird, but also extremely interesting. My practice has always been about worldmaking—and authorship in worldmaking is a crazy idea. You can start a world, but you can’t own its development. It was fascinating to see that manifest in a way I hadn’t designed. In a strange way, I almost felt liberated.

This project created different layers of audiences: the laborers building it, the technical team, the security team, the production team—and even me, watching it happen. Then you have the audience of the Biennial attendees, the journalists trying to reconcile what they’re seeing, and even people who might just read about the work without ever experiencing it. In that sense, the traditional audience is almost collateral.

I use contemporary art as a loophole—as a space where we have the freedom to create these cultural prototypes. But I have no loyalty to contemporary art itself. I perform being a contemporary artist, and I perform these works as contemporary artworks, only because that performance allows these moments to exist.

MF: I’m feeling a lot of synergy with theatrical performance, which is about being together in a space and time. It’s experiential.

RM: There’s always this feeling of being active, right? There’s no real sense of spectatorship—and that’s something I’m very interested in. I work with participants, not spectators. That’s why I like it when people climb on my projects, when they love them, when they hate them. I like when they engage. Spectatorship, on the other hand, weirds me out a little. From an authorship perspective, I just find it strange.

But I do enjoy when spectatorship bends into participation—and that’s a lot of what I teach. The course I’m teaching at ACT, Publication as Worldmaking, anchors itself in the way I work: we constantly ask how to shift from the representational to the generative. Students often come in shaped by academia, which pushes you to represent—to create symbols. But if you’re thinking from a world-making perspective, and you’re creating a public object, it has to be generative. It has to exist as an active proposition, not a static representation.

This is true in theater, in installations, in anything alive: it’s about the generative nature of the moment. Streetschool, for example, isn’t a representation of education, or of the city. It speaks to the city, uses it, consumes it—but it doesn’t try to represent it. That distinction is really important to me—not just for this work, but as a larger framework for how I think about practice.

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The Sharjah Biennial 16 title, to carry, is a multivocal and open-ended proposition. The ever-expanding list of what to carry, and how to carry it, is an invitation to encounter the different formations and positions of the five curators as well as the constellation of resonances they have gathered.

February 6 – June 15, 2025
Sharjah City, Al Hamriyah, Al Dhaid, Kalba, Al Madam, and other locations across the Emirate of Sharjah

to carry a home
to carry a history
to carry a trade
to carry a wound
to carry equatorial heat
to carry resistance
to carry a library of redacted documents
to carry rupture
to carry Te Pō [the beginnings]
to carry change
to carry songs
to carry on
to carry land
to carry the language of the inner soul
to carry new formations
to carry the embrace of a river current
to carry sisterhood and communal connection
to carry the rays of a morning without fear

About the Sharjah Biennial 16:
The Biennial title, to carry, entails understanding our precarity within spaces that are not our own while staying responsive to these sites through the cultures that we hold. It also signifies a bridge between multiple temporalities of embodied pasts and imagined futures, encompassing intergenerational stories and various modes of inheritance. What do we carry when it is time to travel, flee or move on? What are the passages that we form as we migrate between territories and across time? What do we carry when we remain? What do we carry when we survive?

Thus, ‘to carry’ proposes the Biennial as a collective wayfinding, a modality of sense-making and insistent looking—back, inwards and across—instead of a ‘turning away’ amidst tides of annihilation and tyranny. Sharjah Biennial 16 curatorial projects reflect on what it means to carry change and its technological, societal, animistic or ritualistic possibilities. As community doulas would hold space for others during moments of transition, the projects collectively form a threshold space for experiments and collaborations, in which we compose divergent stories, understand failures and dark moments, and hold room for tenderness and rage.

As carriers of different processes and offerings, the curators have cultivated their projects together and apart, allowing room for listening, mutual support and the sharing of resources. Diverse curatorial methodologies—from residencies, workshops and collective production to writing, sonic experiences and expanded publications—are constantly present in the milieu of the Biennial, encouraging critical conversations. Sometimes, projects by different curators sit together in one venue to form a wild polyphony; at other times, they occupy an entire space to recite a story. Together, they form an evolving collection of narratives told from multiple perspectives, geographies and languages.

Curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala and Zeynep Öz, Sharjah Biennial 16 features works by more than 190 participants, including over 200 new commissions, which will be presented across the Emirate of Sharjah.

About the Artist:
Raafat Majzoub (SMACT ‘17) is an architect, artist, writer, and educator based between Boston and Beirut. He is the editor in chief of the Dongola Architecture Series and co-editor of Beyond Ruins (ArchiTangle, 2024) and Design to Live (MIT Press, 2021). Majzoub is the co-founder of award-winning The Outpost magazine and creative director of The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices. He is currently a research fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a lecturer at the Program in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT. He has lectured at the American University of Beirut, Misk Art Institute and Ashkal Alwan, amongst others, and published and exhibited his art internationally.

About the Sharjah Art Foundation:
Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art.

The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of traveling exhibitions and scholarly publications.

About Sharjah:
Sharjah is the third-largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Reflecting the deep commitment to the arts, architectural preservation and cultural education embraced by its ruler, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Sharjah has long been known as the cultural hub of the United Arab Emirates and is home to more than 20 museums, numerous universities, The Africa Institute, Sharjah Performing Arts Academy and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. In 1998, it was named UNESCO’s ‘Arab Capital of Culture’ and has been designated the UNESCO ‘World Book Capital’ for the year 2019.