Compiling this Almanac as the year draws to a close, I find myself struggling to describe all the moments that exist around the margins of our written chronicle of contemporary art. There are manifold joys in watching people realize their creative and intellectual productions and how they share them with us. Whether it is an artist introducing their work and asking them how and why they made certain decisions, joining a curator-led tour of an exhibition, or listening to a discussion filled with insight and passion, such forms of interpersonal engagement elevate the experience of art. Engage in these moments with people you cherish, and the amplified experience becomes a foundation for deeper connections.

One of the many unexpectedly poignant moments I had in 2023 came at the Sharjah Biennial 15 during a performance in an old cinema in Khorfakkan, a town on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates. With a frieze of local icons from ships to animals and tea pots, the modernist building was constructed in 1978, fell into disuse, and was later acquired by the Sharjah Art Foundation for preservation. Staged under the dilapidated ceiling, choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi’s Bird (2023) was a captivating solo dance in which Sofiane performed on a low wooden stage with two pet doves and a garment adorned with shells and other natural objects harvested from the area as feral pigeons flapped and squawked overhead. Forbidden to record the performance, our group of several dozen sat on cushions around the stage in rapt attention at this dramatic collaboration between us and our surroundings. Untangling the threads of this unexpected performance consumed the long drive back across the mountains to downtown Sharjah.

Seeing artists, curators, and professionals at gatherings like the Sharjah Biennial, and later in the year at the Taipei Biennial, brought reunions after many years of difficult travel circumstances. Our postpandemic selves feel different—more fragile, more vulnerable. While Sharjah Biennial 15’s opening week was underway, twin earthquakes shook southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, claiming an estimated 60,000 lives; bodies were lost under piles of concrete in a disaster of an entirely preventable scale. Registering the extent of this tragedy that made entire cities uninhabitable while attempting to engage with people and events at the Biennial made for a discordant challenge.

The pace and scale of tragedy was unrelenting. For artists and other cultural professionals from a region now consumed by the most extreme forms of violence since October 7, the contexts in which we produce and experience works of culture feel brittle and fraught. At the opening weekend in November for the Taipei Biennial 2023, titled “Small World,” those sentiments hung heavily in the air. Yet among the many artists and others art professionals who gathered in communal spaces like the Music Room in the basement of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to listen to talks and performances such as Indonesian musician Julian Abraham “Togar” jamming with Palestinian painter Samia Halaby’s computer-program-generated abstractions, intimate settings offered time and respite away from the horrors of the wider world.

Across many of the memorable artworks and events of the year—as in Hajra Waheed’s architectural installation where audience members sat or lay down and felt filled by a wordlessly vocalized composition, Hum II (2023), which also debuted at Sharjah Biennial 15—the boundaries between performers and audiences felt realigned. We, the audience, seem to be closer to them, the performers. The boundaries feel more porous, more fluid. In December, I was fortunate to hear a performance by the Chinese pianist Lang Lang with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. His rendition of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 was virtuosic and soulful, and the audience was mesmerized and moved. In the second half, the conductor Jaap van Zweden presided over Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, a rousing modernist composition full of Americana. Years had passed since I had seen a live orchestra, and I found myself looking at the musicians, noticing how those who weren’t playing would sit and watch their colleagues for much of the performance, waiting for their moment. I was especially taken with the percussionists—how crucial the timpani player was to the cinematic moments of drama, how a riff with the triangle drove the mood into a frenzy, how climatic the clash of a cymbal felt. Sitting in the balcony was like sitting on stage, though my only obligation in the percussion department was appropriately timed applause.

The “small world” effect, as I came to appreciate across the year, means breaking down those barriers between artist, audience, and artwork; avoiding situations where artworks are presented as pure, disembodied luxury commodities; insisting on human moments that have the potential to connect us, rather than those divisive digital experiences that now characterize our lives. Don’t be distant if you can be close. Don’t be remote if you can be in-person. Walk around artworks, spend time in their presence, go along with them.