Beauty and carnage

"Zulu Time" is an unsettling exhibit at MMoCA

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Every time you see a clock, and with each glance at your phone, it’s there: Time. It’s measured with atomic precision at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, where Greenwich Mean Time sets the standard for timekeeping all over the world.

Zulu Time, an exhibit at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art by ascending artist Kambui Olujimi, hopes to upend our assumptions about power, using time as a metaphor.

“Zulu Time is an implementation of a power dynamic. It’s like: I tell you what time it is, in a very basic way, and you abide by it,” says Olujimi. “The show really is about who gets to say what time it is, and enforce that.”

Created for display at MMoCA and running in the State Street Gallery through August 13, Zulu Time addresses long-standing issues of racial and social inequality bred from insidious, oft-overlooked systems of power.

It’s no coincidence either that the exhibition comes at such a turbulent time in U.S. politics. During a talk at the exhibition’s June 2 opening Olujimi, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, said he scrapped earlier iterations of the show in order to display more topical work: “Everything changed after the [presidential] election.”

Zulu Time showcases several series of Olujimi’s multi-media pieces, woven together by ideas of race, power, politics and human habitation.

Interspersed throughout the first-floor gallery are sculptures from the “Killing Time” and “InDecisive Moments” series.

“Killing Time” consists is a set of five sparse yet evocative wall-hanging sculptures composed of handcuffs strung together with reflective chains and costume jewelry, with jewels and feathers adorning instruments of imprisonment.

“Thinking about these handcuffs, I’m not trying to move away from what they symbolize,” says Olujimi, “... the restraint of people, the stealing of black bodies, mass incarceration — but it’s never a note, it’s a chord.”

Along the gallery’s street-facing wall stands “T-Minus Ø,” a diplomatic row of 13 cotton flags, imprinted not with national insignias, but instead with brightly colored images of explosions from a failed space-shuttle launch. Despite the grim subject, the images become enchanting: Their lush textures and serpentine forms, set starkly against blue skies, transform carnage into color and form, chaos into pure aesthetic.

Both series display the complexity of Olujimi’s work, which delicately combines overt symbols of oppression and destruction with unapologetic beauty.

Another piece central to the exhibition is “Ville Radieuse, habite-a-machine (The Radiant City, the living machine),” a large-scale print depicting the explosive mid-’70s demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, less than two decades after they were built.

According to the artist’s statement, many people blamed Pruitt-Igoe’s demise on the tenants themselves, solidifying a ghastly loop of victim-blaming and underscoring the country’s stark racial and class divides.

Tucked away on the floor of the gallery’s front corner is “Fathom.” Composed of five chandeliers (symbolic of British colonial rule) resting on wooden pallets supported by rubber inner tubes, the work conjures the forms of bodies on a raft, or refugees on an immigrant vessel. It’s a scene that, true to Olujimi’s vision, is complicated — troubled yet hopeful.

“We live in a place of multiplicity and hybridity, and that’s what fucked up and complicated about just living,” he says. “But as a maker you try and have some beauty. I live in beauty. I’m from beauty. The challenges that we face are not happening in a vacuum.”