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.