Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

to those floating mountains of ice whose exposed peaks belie their
massive underwater heft. Contrasting medium and message, Olujimi
uses glass, an inherently transparent material, to create sculptures that
remind us of a natural phenomenon whose real danger lies hidden beneath
the surface. This visual pun serves as a metaphor for the opaque
policies that privilege some while destroying others. In other words,
the injustices we can see are only the “tip of the iceberg,” while the true
source of America’s systemic and racially determined discrimination
is the country’s structural foundation. 2 Indeed, centuries after the
country’s founding, inequitable core principles continue to influence
through unfair policies and political violence. 3
The sculptures comprising InDecisive Moments recall both
geological formations (icebergs) and methods for time keeping
(hourglasses). Olujimi ascribes this visual convergence to his interest
in the scientific notion of “deep time,” from which springs our modern
conception of geological time—that “immense arc of non-human
history” that accounts for the formation of the earth itself. Impossible
to comprehend within the scale of human time, deep time reveals the
imperceptible forces that shaped the world as we currently perceive it:
the record of continents moving and reshaping, of mountain ranges
rising and falling, and of glaciers—the source of icebergs—transforming
topographies. 4
In the work titled The Black That Birthed Us Olujimi again
brings us out of human time to consider the elemental systems
underlying all life. Twenty-five large sheets of printed paper have been
attached to the gallery wall to reveal a composite image of star clusters
and intergalactic dust. The work can be read as an homage to the big
2. Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a succinct and
numerical summary of America’s racially directed
policies towards its Black population:
“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety
years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate
but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing
policy.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for
Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 24, 2014.
3. Structural racism refers to the normalization
and legitimization of historical, cultural,
institutional, and interpersonal policies,
practices, and attitudes that perpetuate and
produce cumulative, chronic adverse outcomes
for people of color. Keith Lawrence and
Terry Keleher, “Chronic Disparity: Strong
and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities:
Poverty Outcomes: Structural Racism”
(paper presented at the National Conference
on Race and Public Policy, Berkeley, CA,
November 2004).
4. David Farrier, “How the Concept of Deep
Time is Changing,” The Atlantic, October 31,
2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/
archive/2016/10/aeon-deep-time/505922/.
bang theory, which explains how the universe developed from a tiny,
dense state into what it is today, including the most basic forces in
nature, from electromagnetism to gravity. The science of the big bang
and of deep time have enabled us to construct an encompassing view
that places human history in the context of scientific historiography—
a way to perceive what could not otherwise be seen.
On the wall facing The Black That Birthed Us is a second
composite image made from another set of 25 sheets of paper. Rather
than conjuring associations to those forces outside of time that have
impacted how we see the earth, Ville Radieuse, habite-à-machine (The
Radiant City, the living machine) presents a view of the very human
forces—situated within the perceivable chronology of historic time—
that covertly direct the course of our lives.
This installation pictures the implosion of St. Louis’s Pruitt-
Igoe housing projects, the now-infamous public housing structures
that stood as towering symbols of inner-city poverty before being
demolished in the 1970s. But Olujimi does not simply replicate the
archival image in large scale. Instead, he digitally alters it with visual
echoes and stutters—blurring, multiplying, shrinking, cropping, and
overlapping the image onto itself so that it bounces back and forth
between clarity and obfuscation. He uses an image within an image
within an image to represent the notion of a system within a system
within a system. Thus, the formal attributes of this piece complement
the artist’s conceptual point that inequalities, including housing
inequalities, exist not on a single plane with one-point perspective,
but within multiple contexts and facets that interact and interconnect,
positioned on top of and within each other; some visible, some
distorted, and some beyond sight.
Familiar narratives constructed around the failures of
Pruitt-Igoe blame modernist architecture, public assistance programs,
or the predominantly Black residents themselves. 5 With Ville
Radieuse, habite-à-machine, however, Olujimi offers a more complex
reading. He suggests that focusing on the visible elements at the surface
of the narrative—the architectural design of the project, public welfare
programs, the inhabitants of the building—conveniently blinds us to
the larger contextual forces at play: the economic decline of post-World
War II urban St. Louis, and the city’s public policies and insidious
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