Kambui Olujimi, Your King Is on Fire, 2020

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.