Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

y conquest cultures and reflects Western visions of the African continent.
Modernity’s aesthetic wing, shorthanded as modernism, relies upon traditions
and practices that have notoriously fixed the nonwhite body within
temporal stasis, if not regression, through representational traps that tarry
between hypervisible and invisible, undesirable and lasciviously sexual.
Modernism tends to maintain the temporal logics of modernity, which lock
the Black body into a temporal logic of regression— the stereotype of the
savage left behind by the West, and therefore stuck in History and therefore
lagging behind in narrative progression. 4
In light of this, Olujimi flips the script. He uses Zulu Time as a
point of departure, considering the ways that Blackness itself might always
be imbedded in modernity’s logics of time and, by extension, structures
of power. In other words, Olujimi suggests that “Zulu” being the name
for a universal system of timekeeping is no coincidence. Because the word
connotes a people whose anticolonial history has been oft-cited in Black
freedom struggles across the world, “Zulu” connects Blackness to the field
of temporal play. Olujimi calls attention to these vestiges in the structuring
of everyday contemporary life, and, by extension, illuminates modernism’s
role in the consolidation of white supremacy today. His is an anachronistic
4. For more on the relationship between temporality,
colonialism, and empire as it unevenly
impacted African diasporic subjects, see: Anne
McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Keya Ganguly, “Temporality
and postcolonial critique,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed.
Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004),162–182; Simon Gikandi, “Globalization
and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” South
Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (2001): 627–658;
Barbara Fuchs and David J. Baker, “The Postcolonial
Past,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly
65, no. 3 (2004): 329–340.
Black-aesthetic practice that takes time out of sync, and settles in the impasse
of irreconcilable liminality. In this visual formulation, time becomes
a mechanism through which we understand power through sight—what we
see is not only what we get, but also what was given to us.
To mobilize this kind of sight through Olujimi’s works is to suspend
oneself between explosion and implosion, and ultimately to practice
modes of relationality gripped by the gestures of disturbance. Take Killing
Time (2017), for instance: a series of wall hangings composed of single
and hinged handcuffs decorated with costume jewelry, gold-plated chains,
feathers, fake pearls, and shiny cubic zirconia. The cuffs and delicate expanses
of chain unravel across the wall, calling attention to the transitional
functions of the prison industrial complex as they unevenly impact Black
people. As handcuffs are used to temporarily limit movement of subjects
accused of transgressing the law, Olujimi’s instruments of restraint are
fashioned to form a precarious relationality pieced together through thinly
constituted chains. Their juxtapositions, excesses, and scale position us at
the crossroads of pain and pleasure particular to Black life.
In Killing Time, Olujimi cites and departs from Melvin Edwards’s
phenomenal Lynch Fragments (1963–ongoing). This series of relief sculptures,
composed of layered and entwined metal chains, fragments, and
industrial objects sometimes used in acts of anti-Black violence, calls
attention to the weight of such bodies of pain. Departing from Edwards,
Olujimi installs cuffs in plain view, making the conditions of such violence
unavoidable to his audience. In Olujimi’s work, as in Edwards’s, there’s a
call to think about the ways that power manifests relations between subjects
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