Fikra Design Biennial

The Fikra Graphic Design Biennial launched its inaugural edition end of 2018 with the title, “Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Ministry of Graphic Design”. This wide-ranging exhibition and curatorial initiative explored graphic design’s influence in shaping the present and imagining potential futures.

Fikra's Ministry of Graphic Design was organized into several Departments, each representing a distinctive curatorial focus and format. These Departments include the Department of Graphic Optimism, Department of Dematerializing Language, Department of Non-Binaries, Department of Flying Saucers, and Department of Mapping Margins. Presenting objects, ideas, performances, installations, and more, the exhibition’s curatorial departments embrace a polyphonic and geographically-diverse approach to historical and contemporary practice.

For more info visit www.fikrabiennial.com

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Hala Al-Ani from Mobius Design Studio curated the Department of Flying Saucers. Named in recognition of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Flying Saucer building, the department served as an open space that hosts ephemeral, parachute presentations by four independent initiatives: Seendosi, Public Fiction, Foundland, and Turbo. Emerging out of graphic design and based in locations ranging from Amman, Amsterdam, Cairo, Los Angeles, and Seoul, these “flying saucers” each land in Sharjah for a short time to activate the platform through collaborative workshops, lectures, parties, pop-up shops, and more. Like sightings of an unidentified flying object, their arrivals were all-too-brief and rarely concrete, yet provocatively open up questions. It was an homage to all the world’s aliens: the anomalous, the unfamiliar, the temporal, the mysterious, the peculiar, the inexplicable, the uncanny, the obscure, the puzzling, the unlike-anything-else-you-have-ever-witnessed-before.