Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

In fact, there is a great deal of visual poetry in Olujimi’s
work—tiny catharses, moments of retinal splendor. His chandelier
installation, titled Fathom (2017), is likewise transformative and
disruptive. Typically identified with (white) privilege and wealth,
chandeliers normally hang high overheard. In Olujimi’s sculpture, six
ornate and opulent working chandeliers have been jarringly dislocated
from their usual position and context. Now on the floor, they retain
a residual elegance but also look ungainly and precarious. They are
much closer now, not remote and magisterial, but right here, next
to us, intimate chandeliers suggesting human bodies with slightly
sagging postures. On the floor, Olujimi’s chandeliers function not just
as sources of light but also as fragile sources of power. The chandeliers
rest like figures on a structure that refers to the improvised crafts
used by refugees as they make dangerous ocean voyages. Fathom thus
addresses a political and moral crisis. At a time when millions of
vulnerable refugees are desperately seeking some measure of solace
and safety, virulent hostility to immigrants is a rising force in many
countries, including the United States.
Importantly, despite their completely altered conditions,
these chandeliers continue to function as they normally would; they
continue to illuminate the room, or at least parts of it. This helps
explain why Olujimi’s art is so distinctive, especially when it comes to
his use of found objects and images. His objects—be they a chandelier,
handcuffs, earrings, necklace, or photograph—retain a residual
familiarity that points to their original function, while simultaneously
existing as completely transformed. Olujimi leaves it for the viewer
to move between these two contexts, the one familiar and at times
mundane, and the other eccentric, destabilizing, misbehaving, and
invigorating.
Here it is worth recalling the great Russian literary critic and
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), and his idea of the carnival,
which he applied to literature (especially to Dostoevsky’s novels),
but which can also be fruitfully applied to certain kinds of visual
art, including Olujimi’s. 1 For Bakhtin, the “carnivalized moment” or
“carnivalized situation” (or, in this context, the carnivalized object) are
1. All quotes from and references to Mikhail
Bakhtin are from his Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
122–124.
Facing, 42–43:
Fathom
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