Kambui Olujimi
Your King Is on Fire
2020
Not on view
Date
2020
Classification
Drawings
Medium
Watercolor on paper, (b,c)Watercolor and graphite on paper, (a)
Dimensions
Sheet (each): 14 × 11in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)
Accession number
2021.73a-c
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing and Print Committee
Rights and reproductions
© Kambui Olujimi
Visual description
Your King Is on Fire, 2020 is a series of images on paper by Kambui Olujimi made of watercolor and graphite. These paintings show the fiery progression of the destruction of the statue of King Leopold II in Antwerp, Belgium. Against a cloudy black, gray, and blue background, stands the statue of King Leopold II in the center frame. The statue depicts a man with white pants and a dark military jacket leaning against a podium inscribed with a national seal. The figure holds a hat in his left hand. Flames consume the torso and head of the statue. The flames flare upward and appear to emit a gauzy blue smoke.
This series brings contemporary conversations about historical monuments into focus, especially following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the global resistance movements against white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism during the summer of 2020. In particular the work highlights resistance movements that responded to the nefarious history of Belgium’s participation in the practice of exploiting Africans and Africa. King Leopold II was known for enslaving and torturing Congolese families and conscripting orphans into his private army. It is estimated that his atrocities resulted in the deaths of 10 million people.
Audio
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Minisode: Kambui Olujimi on two works made in quarantine
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Narrator: Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today we hear from artist Kambui Olujimi who has two paintings currently on view at the Whitney. His works, Your King Is on Fire and Hart Island Crew, are included in the exhibition Inheritance, up through February.
Kambui Olujimi: My name is Kambui Olujimi, I'm from Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. I'm an interdisciplinary artist and I like to make things. These paintings are part of a collection of works that I'm calling the Quarantine series, because I made them when I was in quarantine during the lockdown of 2020. Both Your King Is on Fire, the triptych, and Hart Island Crew.
Hart Island is this little island right across from Rikers and for a little more than a century we've been burying the unclaimed dead there. This painting is a horizontal painting that has six figures dressed in white hazmat suits moving coffins around in a mass grave. The grave is open and the landscape is kind of hilly. In the distance, there are a few figures that are silhouetted. Two have guns and two have a kind of cap that reads as a correctional or law enforcement hat. Then in the distance you can see the sun setting over the hill.
So during the pandemic there were these refrigerated morgues that were mobile because New York City had so many fatalities. And so it made me start to think about all of the loss that we were going through and suffering through without having a real space to mourn or to grieve. People weren't allowed to gather. And so it led me to Hart Island because a lot of people were unclaimed. There was maybe not family, or family was in a place where they weren't reachable. And there's a place—pretty much everywhere there's a potter's field is what we call it—where you bury unclaimed dead.
And as I started to do some research on Hart Island, a lot of the labor that was done there was performed by incarcerated folks at Rikers. Over the years, the incarcerated were asked to absorb a lot of this grief. They're the only mourners for bodies that are buried there. So unclaimed dead from the AIDS epidemic, from just living in New York, from crack, from Covid, there are these waves of deaths that happen in any urban space. But in New York, and as a New Yorker in particular, this was my black hole. I feel some kind of way about New York. These are my folks that are unclaimed. And so it started to pick away at me or tap me on the shoulder a bunch.
A lot of the work that I was doing at the time was interior. I was in small spaces. I was thinking about small spaces, and this one is much more expansive. You can see the figures in the far distance, these silhouettes, ominous silhouettes, guards who are holding guns and forcing this process to happen or ensuring beyond choice that this process would happen. And the sky is a sunset, sort of romantic in a classic sense—a romantic sunset that is beautiful. When I was a kid, my mother was big on primary material. So we watched actual firsthand footage when my mother would talk to me and my siblings about history. And I remember being struck one time by footage from a concentration camp being liberated at the end of World War II. There were times when I was like, “but it's just so sunny.” It didn't seem like this could be a thing that could happen on such a beautiful day.
This painting is a tryptic titled Your King Is on Fire. It pictures a statue of King Leopold on fire. King Leopold was the king of Belgium. Belgium was a colonial power and colonized the Congo and did it most brutally. It's estimated that during this period up to fifteen million Congolese were murdered. There's not a lot globally in terms of the response for years around these actions. And it's only recently that it's beginning to be talked about in a wider context, a wider Western context. In Belgium, there have been protests around the sculptures of Leopold for some time.
And so, while in America we were having conversations around Confederate monuments and their removal, you see that this is not just happening with regards to Lee and Christopher Columbus, but also Rhodes and Leopold. And so the lockdown really collapsed space in a way where these struggles that were happening here were having shock waves throughout the globe. And the statue in Antwerp was set on fire and eventually removed.
There was a joy in seeing this sculpture removed for me. There's no way you could ask for redemption in light of these kinds of mutilations. And even as a young person, there's a doom that gets put on you. Because I'm not them, I'm not Belgium, I'm not Leopold, but we are human. And so as a kid, I was very much into space and the universe, and we can make all these artificial lines here on this planet, but you go anywhere in the universe, y'all all just humans. Just like I can talk about being from Brooklyn and how different that is from being from Queens and this and that. But I go to Senegal, I'm an American. I'm an American and they want to know why my country has gun violence on the level that it does. They want to know why my country…and I'm like, “they don't really listen to me like that.”
The further away from home you go, the more that home gets consolidated. And so that's a way of thinking of it now. But as a kid, I was just like, “we are all human and this is what humans be about,” and there's a doom to that. To see that there was a reconciliation, or at least steps towards that, or steps towards taking that myth of the monarch down or chipping away at it, and I mean this specific monarch, it was joyful.
Narrator: Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson.
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Descripción verbal: Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020
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Narrator: Your King Is on Fire, 2020 es una serie de imágenes en papel que Kambui Olujimi realizó con acuarelas y lápiz de grafito. Estas pinturas muestran cómo el fuego consume hasta destruir la estatua del Rey Leopoldo II en Amberes, Bélgica. La estatua del Rey Leopoldo II se encuentra en posición central delante de un fondo ahumado de color azul, gris y negro. La estatua representa la figura de un hombre que lleva puestos pantalones de color blanco y una chaqueta militar oscura y está apoyado sobre un podio que tiene inscrito un sello nacional. La figura sostiene un sombrero en la mano izquierda. Llamaradas de fuego consumen el torso y la cabeza de la estatua. Las llamas ascienden y parecen producir un humo de color azul translúcido. La serie incita una conversación contemporánea sobre los monumentos históricos, especialmente después de la elección de Donald Trump como presidente en 2016 y los movimientos de resistencia globales en contra de la supremacía blanca, el colonialismo y el imperialismo durante el verano de 2020. En particular, la obra pone en relieve los movimientos de resistencia que respondieron a la historia nefaria sobre la participación de Bélgica en la explotación de africanos y de África. El Rey Leopoldo II fue conocido por esclavizar y torturar a familias congolesas y reclutar a los huérfanos para su ejército privado. Se estima que las atrocidades que cometió resultaron en la muerte de diez millones de personas.
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Verbal Description: Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020
0:00
Narrator: Your King Is on Fire, 2020 is a series of images on paper by Kambui Olujimi made of watercolor and graphite. These paintings show the fiery progression of the destruction of the statue of King Leopold II in Antwerp, Belgium. Against a cloudy black, gray, and blue background, stands the statue of King Leopold II in the center frame. The statue depicts a man with white pants and a dark military jacket leaning against a podium inscribed with a national seal. The figure holds a hat in his left hand. Flames consume the torso and head of the statue. The flames flare upward and appear to emit a gauzy blue smoke.
This series brings contemporary conversations about historical monuments into focus, especially following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the global resistance movements against white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism during the summer of 2020. In particular the work highlights resistance movements that responded to the nefarious history of Belgium’s participation in the practice of exploiting Africans and Africa. King Leopold II was known for enslaving and torturing Congolese families and conscripting orphans into his private army. It is estimated that his atrocities resulted in the deaths of 10 million people.
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Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020
In Inheritance (Spanish)
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Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020
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Kambui Olujimi: Me llamo Kambui Olujimi y soy de Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. Soy un artista interdisciplinario y me gusta crear cosas.
El rey Leopoldo fue rey de Bélgica. Bélgica fue una potencia colonialista que colonizó el Congo de la manera más brutal.
En Bélgica, hace tiempo que hay protestas contra las esculturas de Leopoldo III. Les han arrojado pintura, y durante las manifestaciones de Black Lives Matter que tuvieron lugar en la pandemia, muchos imperialistas colonialistas... bueno, sus estatuas estuvieron bajo el escrutinio público. Entre ellas, las de Leopoldo III. Prendieron fuego la estatua y partes de la ciudad de Amberes, por lo que al final retiraron la estatua de este rey.
Así que existió una reconciliación, o al menos un intento de reconciliación o de derribar el mito del monarca o de ir restándole significado a este monarca en particular. Fue un momento de mucho júbilo. Y esta felicidad era algo que me daba vueltas en la cabeza, pero se manifestó de distintas maneras. El primer cuadro que ve es la figura. Luego ve que la figura empieza a desvanecerse. Y yo sentía que eso guarda cierta belleza. Ese color lavanda. Me gusta mucho el azul lavanda ahumado. Me gusta el humo lavanda que aparece en la figura en blanco en el primer cuadro y en el segundo.
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Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020
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Kambui Olujimi: My name is Kambui Olujimi, I'm from Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. I'm an interdisciplinary artist and I like to make things.
King Leopold [II] was the king of Belgium. Belgium was a colonial power and colonized the Congo and did it most brutally.
In Belgium, there's been protests around the sculptures of Leopold [II] for some time. People have thrown paint on them, and during the BLM movement that was happening during the pandemic, a lot of colonial imperialists were…their statues were under scrutiny. He was one of them. And the statue and Antwerp was set on fire and eventually removed.
And so to see there was a reconciliation, or at least steps towards taking that myth of the monarch down or chipping away at it, and I mean this specific monarch, it was joyful. It was joyful, and so it was something that was in my head, but it came out in different ways. The first one, you can see the figure. The second one, the figure is swallowed. And I felt like there was a beauty to that lavender. I really like this smokey lavender blue. That's in the white in the first one and the second one.
