The Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s leading international art events, opened its sixth edition to the public on 13 September 2025. Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation—the first non-Japanese Artistic Director in the triennale’s history—the exhibition draws its title, A Time Between Ashes and Roses, from a verse by the Syrian poet Adonis, a leading voice in the contemporary Arab world.
One of the gallery spaces in the Arts Center is dedicated to Iraqi artist Bassim Al Shaker’s heartbreakingly beautiful canvases, “Sky Revolution” (2023) and new pieces “Allegory of the Sky” and “New Birth.” The former renders scenes witnessed by Al Shaker following bombings during the Iraq War in 2003, meant to evoke the simultaneous cataclysmic rupture and frozen silence of the sky during aerial bombardment.
