The 15th Sharjah Biennial: An Interview with Dr Kimathi Donkor

The Sharjah Biennial is a major contemporary art exhibition which takes place every 2 years and has offered global cultural and artistic exchange since its conception in 1993.

For the 30^th anniversary edition of the biennial which takes place from 7 February to 11 June, Camberwell College of Art’s Dr Kimathi Donkor, Interim Programme Director for Fine Art: Painting, was asked to contribute work in line with this year’s theme, Thinking Historically in the Present. The theme encourages participating artists to challenge understandings of nationhood, tradition, race, gender, body and imagination and was conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor - a Nigerian American curator who previously curated the Venice Biennale - and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Originally adopting the traditional biennial format of having representative artists from participating countries around the world, the biennial has since evolved with the Sharjah Art Foundation running events all year round to meet the growing regional and global interest in contemporary art.

The biennial features over 300 works by 150 artists which have been installed in 5 towns and cities across the Emirate.

Hi Kimathi! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your practice as an artist?

I’m Kimathi Donkor and I'm currently the Interim Programme Director for Fine Art: Painting and Reader in Contemporary Painting and Black Art at Camberwell College of Arts.

I’m based in London, and I predominantly work in painting. I’ve been making and exhibiting work for many years, but what's probably interesting to a lot of people about my work is the subject matter, the content and the style of the painting.

Up until recently I had predominantly been what you would call a figurative painter, meaning I paint images of people, places, objects and things. I'm very interested in global Black histories, specifically histories of significant figures, events, and places. For example, one of my favourite paintings is called Toussaint L’Ouverture at Bedouret, which depicts the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who led a revolution against slavery and French colonialism in the Caribbean in the 18th century.

As well as historical paintings, I'm also interested in contemporary life in the UK and my work in this area focusses on the relationship between the Black community and the police, highlighting the violent oppression and discrimination that many people experience.

I also enjoy painting serene everyday experiences such as taking a walk in a park; I suppose you might call the more peaceful aspects of everyday life.

Have you always been interested in painting?

I can certainly remember instances quite early on in my childhood where I really enjoyed making art. I remember during the 1970s, when I was in primary school, there was a wave of interest in Tutankhamun, and I remember painting Tutankhamun's gold burial mask. I was quite a creative child – the paintbrushes were never far from my hand.

In my early teens I decided art was the direction for me. At first, I was interested in comic books, and I think you can probably see that in my practice which features a lot of action scenes and has a kind of comic book type of feel, although I don't necessarily use those techniques.

You’re one of the artists showing at this year’s Sharjah Biennial. Can you tell us a bit more about it? 

The Sharjah Biennial is an enormous contemporary art festival which takes place in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. For 30 years they've had this incredible global exhibition where they invite artists from all over the world to come and show their work across a multitude of venues, galleries, museums, and installation sites.

Each biennial has a theme and this year’s title is Thinking Historically in The Present and was originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor.

Obviously from the title, a lot of the contributing artists are thinking about histories and global histories, and you can find installations by artists like Isaac Julien, who currently has a big show at Tate Britain. At the Sharjah Biennial, Isaac has a film installation based around the role of African art in the histories of race and culture in the West.

Barbara Walker, who is nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, is also exhibiting work in Sharjah. In fact, Barbara’s installation – which is based around the Windrush scandal – was a key consideration for the Turner Prize judges when selecting nominees.

How did you get involved with the biennial?

In 2021, 2 of my paintings were on show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as part of an exhibition titled War Inna Babylon: The Community Struggle for Truths and Rights which was curated by Stafford Scott together with his daughter, Kamara Scott, and an independent curator, Rianna Jade Parker. Stafford is a long-time Black activist and organiser who first came to prominence in the 1980s. My paintings that were featured in this show were quite monumental depictions of police violence against Black women – for example The Shooting of Cherry Groce and The Death of Cynthia Jarrett – which occurred in Tottenham where Stafford Scott is based. These works were selected because they epitomise the trauma that has been experienced by Britain's Black communities.

Hoor Al Quasimi, the Director of the Sharjah Biennial, visited the exhibition and really liked my paintings, so she got in touch with my gallerist, Niru Ratnam. Initially she expressed an interest in acquiring one of the paintings for the Sharjah Art Foundation, but the conversation also raised the possibility of my participation in the 15^th Sharjah Biennial.

When she came for a studio visit, I mentioned the fact that these paintings, which were created in 2005, were reiterations of earlier drawings which I had originally shown for my undergraduate degree show in 1987. I dug out these very ancient, quite large drawings which I had been lugging around with me for the previous 35 years and she was excited by the prospect of featuring them works at the biennial alongside more recent paintings. The Foundation also ended up acquiring the entire suite of 1987 drawings which went through a conservation process so they would be ready for public display.

You visited the Sharjah Biennial in February this year. What was the experience like?

I hadn't been to Sharjah before, and it is a long way away! When you're involved in a large-scale institutional exhibition like this, you research and try to understand more about what's happening, but nothing can really prepare you for the reality of landing in this highly urbanised desert nation.

One of the things that Okwui Enwezor was keen to do was to globalise art beyond the North American and Western European domination, which has tended to be the case for many decades. His idea was to bring artists from many different cultures and many different global spaces together. Along with the other artists, I travelled around the country to various venues so we could interact with each other's work and see what we had each been working on. We visited a large-scale installation and performance venue called the The Kalba Ice Factory, a disused kindergarten which had been turned into an art venue, a building called The Spaceship, which is a hyper modernist building repurposed as an art venue, and of course lots of purpose-built galleries. My work was showing at the Sharjah Art Museum.

Can you tell us about some of the work you are showing at the 15^th Sharjah Biennial?

One of the things that I wanted to give people a sense of in this show was the way that the imagery in my artworks were strongly connected to my activism in the 1980s. When I moved to London, I became a community activist and organiser of protests, marches and pickets, and my strength in this was my artistic ability. I would help with the design of flyers, leaflets, posters, journals – things like that. Some of the works featured in the show are examples of various flyers, posters and journals which I'd worked on.

I was also able to show a brand-new painting called The Death of Clinton McCurbin, which depicts what happened to a young, unarmed Black man in his early 20s who had gone into a shop in Wolverhampton and was accused of fraud. There was supposedly a problem with his credit card or something of that nature. Anyway, the police were called and within a few minutes, he ended up dead, having been asphyxiated, according to the coroner's report. Obviously at the time when it happened in 1987, I was involved in community activism and so it had a really powerful impact on me; even more so because this man was quite similar in age to me at the time.

I did the original drawing back in the 80s and when I came to revisit the subject, I looked again at the methodologies I used. I tried to have a fairly forensic approach to the new work: I looked at court records, transcripts of witness statements, press reports, that sort of thing. The events which I'm dealing with weren't ever photographed or captured on social media, so it's about listening to and reading people's recollections, which I'm then transcribing into this painted imagery.

Do you have a highlight from attending the biennial?

It’s a great chance to meet artists from all over the world. There were artists from India, Pakistan, Hawaii, Australia, Brazil – the list goes on. We saw work from a film group from Haiti, dance pieces, Aboriginal work in the form of paintings in the Sharjah Museum. I was completely blown away. The opportunity to meet so many people from across the world and have that cultural exchange was very special and helped me understand more clearly why we need a much more diverse and inclusive contemporary art scene.

Lastly, do you have a message to current Fine Art students?

It’s a cliché, but I would say follow your dreams, be persistent, and don’t throw things away – you never know what opportunities might come up and older work might become relevant again.

On the courses that I teach on, we've got some astonishing artists and it really is such an honour and a privilege to be able to work with so many amazing artists.

• Find out more about the 15th Sharjah Biennial
• Find out more about BA Fine Art: Painting
• Find out more about Kimathi Donkor's work