thumbnail_CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

lg_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

md_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

sm_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

thumbnail_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

Plural

thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

md_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

sm_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

md_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

sm_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

Workman 1

lg_C159_Cover.jpg

md_C159_Cover.jpg

sm_C159_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C159_Cover.jpg

C159_Cover.jpg

Review

Currently based in New York City, Anna Khimasia is a curator and lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Rutgers University.

The Flying Saucer, one of Sharjah Biennial’s unique exhibition spaces, has a storied history. Resembling a UFO and constructed in the mid-’70s, it was previously a chicken restaurant, a newsstand, a gift shop, and a patisserie. It is an architectural landmark, known for its floating dome, panoramic windows, and V-shaped pillars. 

For his ambitious installation “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges,” New York–based artist Kambui Olujimi constructed a 16-sided room under the famous dome. While the diptychs are visible from the exterior of the building, the interior of the newly constructed space remains invisible when looking through the Flying Saucer’s panoramic windows. This spatial shift is mirrored by representational slippage in Olujimi’s work, which prompts us to rethink the conditions of seeing and knowing.

On the outside walls of Olujimi’s constructed room are eight diptychs blending cyanotype with blue, black, and gold watercolour. In this series, 
_A Temporary Understanding of…_ (2022), the first of each pair depicts a historical figure who confuses expectations and blurs genres; each of these is partnered with an image of an object surrounded by a geometric pattern. In _A Temporary Understanding of Ellen Craft_ (2022), Olujimi depicts two people in elaborate suit jackets seated at a table of what we assume to be a train, as we see mountains in the background of a curtain-framed window. Olujimi’s painting style blends and blurs scenes together so that there is no clearly defined space into which we peer. The work deliberately offers an anti–Western art-historical understanding of represented space: there is no vanishing point, there is no ideal spectator, and there is no clearly defined perspective. The figures in the foreground disappear into the window and the landscape blends into their bodies. Depicted at the bottom of the frame are teeth that resemble both an X-ray and ancient rounded stalagmites. Ellen Craft (1826–1891) was a light-skinned, mixed-race enslaved woman from Georgia who disguised herself as a white male and travelled first class to Philadelphia with her Black husband, William Craft, who hid in plain sight by pretending to be enslaved to him. In their escape to freedom, Ellen Craft successfully transgressed race, gender, and class. The accompanying image is of an ornate gold mirror against a blue background, surrounded by a tubular pattern that extends beyond the frame. The mirror does not reflect the viewer, or Ellen and William Craft; rather, it depicts an empty sea, a future tranquil landscape. In these diptychs, the connection between the objects and the historical figures is not always legible, offering another strategy for Olujimi to obfuscate meaning and definition.

Olujimi refers to the figures in these eight diptychs as shape-shifters or tricksters, never fully fixed in their form, always moving between spaces, races, genres, and genders. Other figures depicted include Yma Sumac, Grace Jones, John W. Cooper, John the Conqueror, Samuel R. Delany, Kool Keith, and Octavia Butler. In _A Temporary Understanding of Octavia Butler_ (2022), a double photographic portrait of Butler looks almost sculptural. The two figures look out in different directions, but are connected through a singular body that resembles a textured mountain. Against a gold background, Butler becomes a double-headed icon, with words from her personal journals written across the canvas. The accompanying image is a rotary phone—a reference to the time she worked as a telemarketer.

After walking around the outside of Olujimi’s newly created architectural space, you enter the semi-hidden interior room through one of two small openings. The floor of the room is inches deep with hand-dyed blue sand, housing three porcelain statues and large handmade boulders. An immersive wall painting, _Counting Backwards from Infinity_ (2022), engulfs the space with a pattern of gold lines on blue. Recalling the patterns in the cyanotypes, the painting resembles a labyrinth, or an illegible map from another time and place. In this world where the sand mirrors the sky, and the earth is confused with the sea, we become lost and do not recognize this place. The boulders further confuse, as they suggest a landscape but do not help situate us. Chris Pattishall’s beautifully eerie soundscape, _Call Me Home_ (2023), fills the chamber and works to further unsettle us in this uncanny space.

The three large porcelain busts blend gold leaf and acrylic paint. They depict two-and three-headed figures with numerous eyes and mouths, as if captured from multiple perspectives, or captured in movement over time. Olujimi often talks about his interest in simultaneity, of things happening all at once rather than in succession—yet another way in which he grapples with the fixity of representation. The use of materials and colour throughout the installation— porcelain, gold, cobalt, and indigo—all point to resources entangled in colonial exploitive histories, histories that Olujimi repeatedly disrupts through his shifting representations.

Conceived of by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, the theme of the 15th Sharjah Biennial, _Thinking Historically in the Present_, is echoed throughout Olujimi’s installation as he invites us to reconsider how we have defined history as singular, fixed, and containable. The title of his installation, “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges,” suggests the limits of a self blurred in the dark, whose edges dissolve into space, into objects, and into others. Olujimi’s work is never easily digestible and resists simple definition. It speaks to the very tension between what we see and what we know, and between legibility and illegibility. This impressive large-scale installation grapples with the complexities of history and colonial power. Olujimi’s sculptures, paintings, and photographs help make this immersive installation a place of alternative possibilities. 


This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

lg_155_KHIMASIA.jpg

md_155_KHIMASIA.jpg

sm_155_KHIMASIA.jpg

thumbnail_155_KHIMASIA.jpg

155_KHIMASIA.jpg

155_Khimasia.pdf

 “In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges” ran from 7 February to 11 June, 2023 at Sharjah Biennial 15.

“In The Dark, We Lose Our Edges” — Kambui Olujimi

Leo Cocar is a cultural worker from “Vancouver,” the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations. His writing has appeared in _e-flux_, _C Magazine_, and _Numéro Homme Berlin_, among others. Recently, he has been interested in UFC in dialogue with performance art, histories of imperial violence, and the excess accumulation of the death drive within the national psyche.


Christian Vistan’s “from—about” is both a (poetic) inquiry into cultural transmission and an ode to painting itself, with neither taking precedence over the other. In the accompanying exhibition text, Kiel Torres writes of paint as a medium fundamentally tied to the presence of water, or lack thereof: “In our correspondence, Christian and I talked about laundry—how cycles of washing and drying accentuate the temporality of wetness. They explained how painting water extends this ephemeral wet time, offering a way to visualize liminality and articulate intangible distances.” Across the exhibition, Vistan accentuates this temporal quality of wetness through abstract representation of the aquatic, and formal techniques that call attention to paint’s liquid foundation. 

In “from—about,” ideas about cultural transmission are not communicated through figuration or representation, but through subtle deployments of painterly technique. Vistan’s is a material poetics, where signification does not exclusively take place on the level of language, or of the painted figure, but through the painting’s structural supports. Wetness is further mobilized by Vistan through an engagement with the painting’s surface. The liquid contents of paint are highlighted by thin applications of tempera, watercolour, and ink over gesso that soak and wrinkle the painting’s support. In the resulting images, large swaths of colour that appear to be in a permanent state of dampness particularly echo Helen Frankenthaler’s _Canal_ (1963) and _Basin_ (1969), where wetness is deployed as a thematic and material concern. In _Clouds_ (2022), muddled grey, beige, black, and eggplant-purple forms are rendered in ink, tempera, and graphite on unmounted manila paper. A sense of material fluctuation is connoted throughout the work—the manila paper appears to be soaked through with liquid, and gently sways as the gallery’s internal airflow moves beneath the image. The titular reference to clouds suggests not only geographic movement, but also water suspended in between liquid and solid forms: this is an in-between state, a gap. 

We can also turn to _Volcano_ (2022). This painting consists of a cluster of six grey circles over a muddled sky-blue background, divided up into an interlocking series of rough rectangles. Although not taking up the fiery aesthetics of what we could consider typical of a volcano, the volcano’s role as a geological creator is present in the image’s name and in its formal elements. In Vistan’s painting, we witness the stony formation of land-mass before its occupation by terrestrial life, as well as that volcanic distancing between earth and sea. 

In _Unfold_ (2022), a swath of manila paper is folded into a six-by-eight grid and emblazoned with curvilinear yellow and black forms that cut across a background of beige and off-white squares. Outlined yellow forms appear as if they are waiting to be filled in against a wash of white and off-white tempera that evokes the default colour of a canvas. Throughout the works on display, the presence of painting’s support (the canvas, the paper, etc.) is often made visible through an aesthetics of soaking, with wrinkling effects that call attention to the canvas not as a physically untethered neutral ground, but as a material that determines the image laid over it. 

The use of manila paper throughout the show also gestures toward Vistan’s tongue-in-cheek interest in their familial history of migration from the Philippines. Like many other formal elements present through the show, a patchwork made by Vistan’s maternal grandmother contains abstract evocations of water, with aquatic muted colours, and a sense of movement produced from the piece being hung on the gallery door without supports. Other pieces, like _Patch (Paruparo)_ (2022) and _Patch (Baby Blue)_ (2022), suggest further dialogue between this entryway patchwork and its distillation into painting. We can view the patchwork by Vistan’s grandmother as the “from” in the titular “from—about” dyad. Other concerns suggested by the patch, such as cultural translation, the influence of material on form, and the deployment of water on multiple registers, reverberate around the room in a poetically elusive manner that is impossible to pin down. This makes the notion of wet time an effective metaphoric framework with which to approach the exhibition. Even between dry and solid states, paint is still inherently determined by its liquid origin. It is neither here nor there. In Vistan’s paintings, the point of departure will never be the same as the point of arrival. Instead of defining the site of “here” or “there,” “from—about” sits with the gap of transits, distance, and the state of flux. 


Writer

9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

lg_155_COCAR.jpg

md_155_COCAR.jpg

sm_155_COCAR.jpg

thumbnail_155_COCAR.jpg

155_COCAR.jpg

155_Cocar.pdf

“from—about” ran from 17 December to 19 February, 2023 at Unit 17, Vancouver.  


“from—about” — Christian Vistan