Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

Below:
Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900)
Twilight in the Wilderness,
1860
Oil on canvas
framed: 124 x 185 x 13 cm
(48 13/16 x 72 13/16 x 5
1/16 in)
unframed: 101.6 x 162.6 cm
(40 x 64 in)
The Cleveland Museum of
Art, Mr. and Mrs. William
H. Marlatt Fund 1965.233
Facing:
Untitled (detail),
from T-Minus Ø
digitally altered the images to create layered, composite works that are
both found and meticulously constructed, and then digitally printed them
on both sides of the flags. The images are harrowing, but they are also
gorgeous, even sublime. Printed directly on cotton fabric, this imagery
constitutes a highly unorthodox kind of digital-era painting sans paint.
Furthermore, these twenty-first-century “paintings” of high-tech mayhem
connect visually with Romantic nineteenth-century landscape paintings.
One of Olujimi’s untitled flags from this series shows curving white smoke,
billowing pink smoke, and delicate smoke tendrils tinged with turquoise.
Like other works in the series, it evokes a nineteenth-century aptitude for
vastness and wonderment in nature—think of the stunning white, blue,
and orange skies of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840); the overwhelming,
multicolored sky in Frederic Church’s masterpiece Twilight in the Wilderness
(1860), and the many awe-inspiring paintings of the American West by
Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Thomas Moran (1837–1926). Streaking
across a deep blue sky, the smoke and debris, colored white, turquoise,
dark red, orange, purple, and yellow, in the image on the back side of
this same work, would look fine paired with any number of landscape
paintings featuring similar colors and surging energies by J.M.W. Turner.
Unlike traditional paintings, Olujimi’s canvases extend from the
wall on aluminum poles, thus providing more complexity and another layer
of meaning. This row of flags resembles what one might see in a conference
room at the United Nations, but instead of signifying countries, the flags
display disaster after disaster. In a time when so much of the world is
convulsed by strife, and when the utopian promise of a gorgeous, high-tech
future seems deeply suspect, this work by Olujimi is exceptionally apt.
View Kambui Olujimi’s wall-sized composite photograph Ville
Radieuse, habite-à-machine (The Radiant City, the living machine), 2017,
with Bakhtin’s notion of carnivalization in mind. The work is rooted in two
familiar items: wheat-paste posters common on city streets and decorative
wallpaper in a home. Twenty-five paper sheets form a rhythmic, almost
percussive, image of the massive St. Louis housing project Pruitt-Igoe
being detonated in 1972. Rarely has such a grand and monumental urban
renewal project gone so wrong so quickly, and its demise is documented
here with sagging buildings and erupting smoke. Pruitt-Igoe was the first
major project for architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), an American of
Japanese descent who later designed the World Trade Center. Pruitt-Igoe
opened in 1954 and rapidly declined for socio-political reasons involving
poverty, government neglect, incompetence, racial bias, and a chronic
lack of funding for basic maintenance. Based on an iconic photograph of
the project’s demolition, Olujimi’s composite image revisits a signature
historical event but also suggests that the issues surrounding Pruitt-Igoe
remain pertinent. It also connects a planned, manmade disaster with
world-shaping natural forces like earthquakes. On a neighboring wall,
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