Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

Above:
Melvin Edwards
Some Bright Morning, 1963
Welded steel
14.5 x 9.3 x 5 inches
(36.83h x 23.62w x 12.7d cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray
Associates, New York
© 2017 Melvin Edwards/
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
Facing:
Stowaway, from Killing Time
whose bodies are made temporally present by these cuffs, while nevertheless
absent from their presentation. Put another way, in order to meet their
function, the cuffs necessitate wrists which are themselves made present
here only by their absence.
Killing Time activates the suspension of time as mediated through
the prison industrial complex, best understood as the relationship between
prisons, courts, policing, criminalization, and surveillance that anticipates
and exceeds prison walls. The prison industrial complex relies upon
a durational understanding of time, where punishment is determined by
fantastical algebras of equivalence: prison sentences are calculated through
irrational ratios of time, as evidenced by sentences that amount to multiple
lifetimes inside prison walls. “Doing time” becomes shorthand for serving
out one’s sentence, a formula where time is a form of waiting with no
guaranteed endpoint. With Killing Time, Olujimi takes this logic of time in
a different direction, suggesting that to kill time is to do time, while waiting
to make use of time, while waiting for time to pass.
Further, Olujimi’s cuffs and accessories suggest that time is a
practice of relationality mobilized through the proximity to power structures
that make us subjects. However, relationality is by no means overdetermined
by those powers. The blinged-out, decadent objects networked by
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