Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

FAILURE
to LAUNCH
Temporal Suspense in
Kambui Olujimi’s Zulu Time
Sampada Aranke
There is a thin line between explosion and implosion in Kambui
Olujimi’s Zulu Time. Structures and materials are mobilized in ways
that confuse the boundary between these two forms of destruction.
Olujimi leaves us with more than destruction, however. He imparts a
renewed set of sensations that relish in the indeterminacy of construction
and deconstruction, a suspended examination of power’s temporal
dimension
Part of what is at play in Olujimi’s work is an understanding of
the contingency of power. This is best evidenced in T-Minus Ø (2017),
a set of 13 digitally printed cotton flags that feature images of failed
rocket launches. Since military research and the conquest of space are
usually presented as progressive if not utopic explorations undertaken
for scientific knowledge, the rocket becomes the perfect surrogate for
nationalist—and by extension masculinist—vitality. 1 The work of
nationalism is metaphorized through space exploration, and in this vision
of the future, the rhetorics of conquest and settlerism work against
those racialized and gendered bodies who will be left behind.
Olujimi takes the rocket’s promise and disturbs it, then; the
rocket’s phallus wryly signals the doubleness of failed explosion as
an ejaculation gone wrong for the nation and therefore for mankind.
Each flag features one historic failed launch, the images of which are
manipulated by the artist, layered upon themselves, and echoed in
their repetitive presentation. What we see is multiple and spectacular
attempted takeoffs: the pyrotechnics of failure right before the moment
of collapse. What we’re given is a commentary on our current political
moment not as exceptional nor isolated, but rather as part of a broader
system of power in which our political present is a manifestation of the
long durée of history itself.
T-Minus Ø comments on the deep resonances between science
and politics, space and nation, universality and patriotism. Olujimi
arranges these flags so as to proffer a salute, or at least a quiet repose,
in which the viewer is asked to consider how the ambitions of scientific
innovation might mark an affiliation with those nationalist and militaristic
impulses that set these rockets in air. Importantly, these iterative
objects stand in stillness indoors, taken out of their landscapes and
stuck endlessly in their failures to launch. Throughout Olujimi’s work,
time is trapped in the moment of explosion, at once spectacular and yet
eerily static, a moment stuck without resolution.
These are Olujimi’s time bends in Zulu Time. In his work,
time sticks, suspends, holds still. Moments are anticipated, but never
fully activated. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), referred to commonly
as Zulu Time, is a “universal” way of marking time, in which
zero is the point of departure for hours, minutes, and seconds. Standard
timekeepers have adopted UTC as the normative mode of time,
therein reinforcing the West as timekeeper of modernity. 2 Experts
insist that this use of “Zulu” has no direct relation to the Bantu people
of South Africa and that the word is merely adopted from NATO’s phonetic
alphabet in which the letter “Z” is signaled through “Zulu.” However,
the naming points us to colonial methods of timekeeping used
1. For more information on the intersections
between space exploration, popular culture,
and gendered representations, see: Constance
Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and
Sex in America (London: Verso Books, 1997);
Daniel Sage, How Outer Space Made America:
Geography, Organization, and the Cosmic
Sublime (London: Routledge, 2016); Peter
Dickens and James S. Ormrod, eds., The Palgrave
Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer
Space (London: Palgrave, 2016).
2. Jean Baudrillard, “Modernity,” in Encyclopaedia
Universalis Vol. 12, trans. David James
Miller (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis
France, 1985), 424–426; Edward Said, Orientalism
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
3. “Military & Civilian Time Designations,”
Time Zones | Greenwich Mean Time, accessed
February 27, 2017, https://greenwichmeantime.com/info/timezone/.
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