Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

shiny chains blur the boundaries between pain and pleasure. They annotate
handcuffs and jewelry as two kinds of excess: on the one hand,
the forms of structural violence as made evident by the prison industrial
complex, and, on the other, the pleasurable decadence of embellished
jewelry. Both are worn, both require the cold touch of metal on flesh.
This relationality exists within temporal suspense: disturbing gestures
of time-keeping that are unquestionably Black.
Blackness means doing time in a particular way. For Olujimi,
this way is through anachronism, a method of historical collision in
which the past cannot escape its present. Olujimi materializes this
collision through overlay and juxtaposition such that time stands still,
freezes momentarily so as to enable a moment of reflection, thought,
gathering. Operating as a clock of his own making, Olujimi arrives at
the task of timekeeping and asks us to reconsider how radical Black
aesthetic interventions open up impossible possibilities which may,
if we’re lucky, rupture time itself, collapsing past, present, and future
altogether.
1, 2, 13, 14, front
and back covers:
Untitled (detail),
from T-Minus Ø
4–5, 8–9, 13, 14:
T-Minus Ø
(installation view)
12:
Fathom (detail)
14 15