Cover Hoor Al-Qasimi, the first non-Japanese artistic director of Aichi Triennale, an urban art festival in Japan (Photo: courtesy of Sebastian Boettcher)
Hoor Al-Qasimi, the first non-Japanese artistic director of Aichi Triennale, an urban art festival in Japan (Photo: courtesy of Sebastian Boettcher)
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Hoor Al-Qasimi, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, topped ArtReview’s Power 100 list in 2024; this month, she takes the helm of one of Japan’s most prominent international art festivals: Aichi Triennale.
It is less than a month before the opening of the Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s biggest urban international art festivals since its inception in 2010. By the time she joins Tatler on a video call at 10am on a mid-August morning, the festival’s artistic director Hoor Al-Qasimi has already spent hours inspecting installations at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum in the city of Seto. “I’m exhausted,” she admits with a wry smile. Yet her tone betrays more excitement than fatigue: this year’s edition, which opened on September 13 and runs until November 30, will unite artists from 22 countries and territories in an exhibition across Japan’s Aichi Prefecture.
Al-Qasimi is far from her base in Sharjah in the UAE, where, since 2009, she has served as founding president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which runs the Sharjah Biennale set up in 1993 by her father, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, the current ruler of Sharjah. Her relentless work in building the emirate’s cultural scene earned her recognition as the most influential contemporary art figure on ArtReview’s Power 100 list in 2024. This year, she further made history as the first non-Japanese person to take up the top role at the Aichi Triennale.
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Above From left: Takeo Ohbayashi, the chairperson of Aichi Triennale, and Hoor Al-Qasimi at the art festival’s press conference in July 2023 (Photo: courtesy of Aichi Triennale 2025)
From left: Takeo Ohbayashi, the chairperson of Aichi Triennale, and Hoor Al-Qasimi at the art festival’s press conference in July 2023 (Photo: courtesy of Aichi Triennale 2025)
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Sleepy Seto, celebrated for its centuries-old ceramic arts, may be a far cry from Sharjah, the UAE’s third most populous city, known for its museums on art, calligraphy, maritime and historical heritage and its natural sites. But for Al-Qasimi, the decision to host the art festival in this Japanese city 20km northeast of Nagoya was far from arbitrary. Twenty-three years ago, when she was studying to be a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she also learnt Japanese and took frequent trips to the country. Languages come naturally: she grew up speaking English, French and Arabic, studied German and Russian and decided to pick up Japanese and Mandarin for fun; she’s particularly proud of her Beijing accent.
During a visit in 2010, she stumbled upon the first edition of Aichi Triennale. Apart from the numerous Yayoi Kusama installations on display, the event impressed her with its multi-city presence: it took place not in Nagoya City, the capital of Aichi, but also other cities across the prefecture—a scale that offers festival-goers a different experience from the usual single-venue events.
Above ‘Forest of Transformation (Mud Men)’ by Japanese manga artist Morohoshi Daijiro, featured in ‘Monthly Shōnen Champion’ (1981). This piece is displayed at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of the artist and Aichi Triennale 2025)
‘Forest of Transformation (Mud Men)’ by Japanese manga artist Morohoshi Daijiro, featured in ‘Monthly Shōnen Champion’ (1981). This piece is displayed at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of the artist and Aichi Triennale 2025)
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Little did she know then that she would return 15 years later—not to visit but to lead the festival. But first, she would take on her most formative role: running the Sharjah Biennial, aged just 22, after the committee quit, six months before the sixth edition in 2003. At the time, Sharjah was at the beginning stages of developing its contemporary art industry: the Sharjah Biennale since 1993; the Sharjah Art Museum since 1997; the Emirates Fine Art Society and the Sharjah Theatre Festival set up in the 1980s. That observation was especially apparent to Al-Qasimi, who grew up travelling extensively to cities with long-established galleries, museums and festivals, such as New York’s MoMA and Documenta in the German city of Kassel. These experiences would prove foundational to her curating work.
She says she realised, after taking on the Sharjah biennial that it “should do more. I don’t want to get so excited [only] when I’m seeing things in Europe,” she says, adding that she sees the Sharjah Biennial as a way to bring global art dialogue home when “not everyone has the chance to travel”.
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Above ‘Split Ends’ (2020) by Afra Al Dhaheri, an artist from the UAE who will be featured at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of Anna Shtraus, the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai)
‘Split Ends’ (2020) by Afra Al Dhaheri, an artist from the UAE who will be featured at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of Anna Shtraus, the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai)
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Her efforts transformed the biennale from a city-wide event to now an emirate-wide one, extending even to the desert. She founded the Sharjah Art Foundation to build her team and keep audiences engaged year-round through exhibitions, music, film screenings and educational programmes. “I really wanted to decentre the biennial as much as possible,” she says. “The biennial is a tool to reach out to people in places where there aren’t a lot of museums or galleries.” The foundation also trains local curators and art workers, ensuring that Sharjah’s scene grows organically rather than relying on imported expertise.
This commitment to decentring continues in Japan. While speculation has arisen over whether her appointment might shift the demographics of the participating artists at Aichi Triennale, Al Qasimi rejects cultural binaries. “I don’t think of it as culture versus culture,” she says. “The curation of exhibitions and art festivals is not to be limited by geographical boundaries. It’s more about the artists and their works. What is this location? What will people like here? How can the triennial reach new audiences?”
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Above ‘Hunting Place’ (2024) by Wendy Hubert, an Australian artist who will be featured at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of the artist and Aichi Triennale 2025)
‘Hunting Place’ (2024) by Wendy Hubert, an Australian artist who will be featured at Aichi Triennale (Image: courtesy of the artist and Aichi Triennale 2025)
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The 2025 theme, A Time between Ashes and Roses, borrows from the Syrian poet Adonis’s reflections on the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. For Al-Qasimi, it is a prism through which to explore humanity’s relationship with destruction and renewal. Works range from Japanese manga artist Morohoshi Daijiro’s sci-fi horror work and Japanese artist Saijo Akane’s ceramics that explore the boundaries between the self and society, to American artist Simone Leigh’s ceramic sculpture informed by Black feminist theory and Australian artist Yasmin Smith’s sculptural installations that examine colonisation and political ecology. Arab artists are also well represented, their practices spanning heritage, politics, personal memory and global issues.
For Al-Qasimi, the power of such gatherings lies not only in what is exhibited but in their capacity to dissolve borders—geographical, cultural and social—and remind us of art’s essential role in bringing people together. It is this vision, carried from Sharjah to Seto, that cements her position as one of the art world’s most influential bridge-builders. “Biennials and triennals like these are great moments to meet people,” she says. “There’s no limit [to who can visit]. They are for all ages, all races and all classes—and that’s what’s important.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
