Arthur Jafa

Published with LUMA Arles.

Over several decades, American filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa has constructed a compelling body of work that defies categorization. Both powerful and lyrical, his practice combines a profoundly unsettling blend of images and histories. Bringing together affective memories that touch on US history, violence, repression, modalities of survival and how these exist in the production and dissemination of images, music, sound and time-based media, Jafa reflects on the ontology of race and Blackness. This richly illustrated catalog reproduces key works from Jafa's wide-ranging oeuvre and explores the philosophical, historical and artistic implications of his practice, featuring essays and a series of conversations between Jafa and key practitioners working in the fields of cinema, arts and theory.
Arthur Jafa (born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust won him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives and works in Los Angeles.

Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text “My Black Death”: “The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced.”

This essential overview presents Jafa’s best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death and its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars.

Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa (born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust won him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives in Los Angeles.

Arthur Jafa (born 1960) has worked as a cinematographer with such legendary directors as Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee; he has also worked on music videos for well-known artists such as Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles. However, Los Angeles–based Jafa has recently emerged as a powerful artist in his own right. A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions presents Jafa's image-based work through the chopping and juxtaposition of found visual sequences covering subjects such as race, conflict, the cosmos and nature. These, in turn, are placed in conversation with texts by authors and artists of such range as Hilton Als, Jean Baudrillard, Amiri Baraka, Judith Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Fred Moten and Cecil Taylor. This mammoth tome stands as a document of an experienced filmmaker breaking through with a powerful, fully formed voice into the fine art world.

The American artist Arthur Jafa curated the Cahiers d’Art Revue. Arthur Jafa invited artists Mark Leckey, Dana Hoey, Torkwase Dyson, Frida Orupabo and Rashaad Newsome, who shared in their conversations their artistic practice, race and digital culture. The issue also features excerpts from Arthur Jafa’s notebooks that he has been keeping since the 1990s, texts by Man Ray and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University Saidiya Hartman, as well as the short story "Milk of Paradise," by new wave science fiction author James Tiptree Jr.