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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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Plural

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Review

Ami Xherro is a poet and scholar. Her debut book, _Drank, Recruited_, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in Fall 2023.


Eddy Wang is a multidisciplinary artist, academic, and software developer. His current projects include an algorithmic performance of Cornelius Cardew’s _The Great Learning_ with B Kell and TETC, an experimental film with Fan Wu about crystals of time in Chinese cultural celebrations, and a debut L.P. under the moniker Ira Dot with Ryan Akler-Bishop.


> ###### Over Time

There’s a lot on the menu for “On a Table, Over Time,” an exhibition curated by Callum Schuster. It’s a hotpot of water spinach served with a side of lobster and bread flowers. It’s a Japanese tea ceremony accompanied by insects and talking potatoes.

Alvin Luong’s _Ration Eater_ (2023) is a two-piece meal stewed from a representational stir of river spinach (_raumuong_ in Vietnamese) and congee rations. The rations on exhibition suspend the principles of expiration through their salt and paper-pulp composition. Over the rations hangs a banner, a rendered image of Ho Chi Minh City captured by a flight simulator with a garnish of river spinach and sickle. Luong’s piece is inspired by his uncle, who said river spinach became the only leftover crop after the mass herbicide of Agent Orange from the Vietnam War. It became a symbol of ambivalence, reminding Luong’s uncle of a malnourished time of heavily rationed food only eaten for subsistence. A food eaten only for survival has a taste of anxiety, of a hungry precarity that tremors through the body. Hunger is a limit-experience, an intensity that courses through one’s body _via negativa_. Tasting hunger too regularly can throw the body into a state of survival-trepidation: of being alive but not living.

Meanwhile, Justin Ming Yong’s _Bottom Feeder_ (2022) is a plump lobster quilt fashioned together by cotton, cotton batting, and thread. Yong associates the lobster with Cantonese black bean sauce–filled family gatherings and butter-dipping sessions at his aunt’s Newfoundland home. The quilt tickles my own memory-buds, reminding me of another crustacean: the crab. Growing up in British Columbia, the West Coast brethren of the lobster became a staple in the palate of my Chinese-Canadian community. We threw crab cages off the docks in Sydney and enjoyed our spoils with a side of soy sauce. These crustacean ecologies of Eastern and Western Canada carry savoury histories of diasporic identity. Here, diasporic mobility, often interpreted as a movement away from a home, reveals the way communities can adapt to and repurpose an ecological space through authoring new traditions. These two Canadian coasts pinch together a lobstercrab alliance that links crustacean heritage with recipes of diasporic becomings. These recipes are not the same, but they do rhyme. 

> ###### The Tea Ceremony – after Marli Davis’s ) _Laboratory for Heirlooms – A Hybridized Tea Ceremony – 茶道, (vol.2)_ (2022–2023)


An aroma of rice 
swirls across 
the exhibit, 

>>>>>>>>>> its fragrance arresting. 

>>>>>> – 

The rice specks cover 
the ground as if we’re 
kneeling on a white beach.

>>>>>>>>>> Let loom the strangeness, 
only time is ancient, 
just body weave. 

>>>>>> – 

Kimonos lined 
with cicadas drape 
over the sands of rice. 

>>>>>>>>>> Warmth: 
the coils of home, 
thread outstrewn. 
To be permitted 
is to hear in. 

>>>>>> – 

Lying atop several 
hills, symbolic mountains, 
are teapots. 
Some ceramic, 
others paper pulp— 
for the living and 
for the remembrance 
of those past. 

>>>>>>>>>> The artist’s DNA 
in the form of cheek 
swabs is steeped 
into the tea, 
along with photos, 
text and scripture, 
claiming a history 
that is only shared: 
Davis calls it 
“transgenerational 
epigenetics.” 

>>>>>> – 

The slowness of a tea 
ceremony rewires 
our temporal expectations, 
inviting us to taste 
a savoury logic 
beyond dry efficiency 
and bitter consumption. 

>>>>>>>>>> A small bell 
hangs atop. 
You can almost hear it 
sound under 
the tremolo 
of incense wind. 
To draw close 
is to listen for breath. 

Just as cicadas shed their skin in the summer after prolonging flight into the white-hot night, their crunchy body is evidence, overhanging a papier mâché tea-set waiting to be undrawn. 

> ###### On a Table 

Among the comforts of home in Brigida Cuddemi’s _Colonna_ (2019) and _Untitled (Basket)_ (c. 1998) are various flower arrangements crowning: a column, a flat hanging basket, and familiar vases. Small vulvar stigmata are intricately arranged between the folds of yellow and pink petals, all moulded from bread. Cuddemi hails from Salemi, Sicily, which is known for its elaborate displays of bread sculptures on chapels and shrines. In preparation for St. Joseph’s Day, the people of Salemi create elaborate displays of bread sculptures covered in oranges, lemons, fennel, and ornately shaped breads of every size. The intricacy in the sculpting of the dough pays homage to the pagan belief in the magic of grain, but is also a metaphor for basic necessities and living conditions. Working with flour, water, Mod Podge and push pins, Cuddemi sees herself as a shaper of tradition, wherein bread becomes a floating signifier for faith and toil alike. 

Benjamin de Boer’s _Rimless Source_ (2023) is a prose poem originally written on a typewriter, and composed of a single non-sentence, somewhere between the monumental Joycean clause and the etchings of Sumerian accountants on stone: “to prolong one piece of paper.” In its accumulatory dailyness is evidenced a life of writing, the inheritance of autobiography where the pronoun “I” meanders back and forth until it dissolves altogether. De Boer writes of sugar tangling in knots on a pink tongue, nectar, rain, and crying, the wetness of which returns to its rimless snout. Like digestion, the process of writing turns the outside inward. It is only the well-deserved dessert of a dinner out.

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

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 “On a Table, Over Time” ran from 10 March to 9 April 2023 at the plumb, Toronto. 

“On a Table, Over Time” — Benjamin de Boer, Brigida Cuddemi, Iman Datoo, Marli Davis, Dave Dyment, Alvin Luong, Kelly Mark, Dupla Molcajete (Beatriz Paz Jimenez & Zoë Heyn-Jones), Carrie Perreault, Walter Scott, Justin Ming Yong

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. 


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 “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

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