ARTHUR JAFA

If Jafa’s repository of images is a dense and shifting mass, each cinematic work exists as a wave – a swell of sound and feeling that unmoors the viewer into a sea of unfixed relationality and aesthetic liquidity. Operating at the highest frequency of visual and sonic expression, the kinetically charged films amplify the incalculable expanse of life inAmerica, Africa and beyond. Jafa’s films are often individual clips sutured together, subtly or surprisingly doctored.Sourcing found and personal footage since the 1980s, Jafa intertwines his substantial catalogue with a corresponding sampled score. Each conjunction strikes a chord; collision and affect coexist in an ongoing, visceral exchange.Emerging from this flow of careful curation and choreographed editing is Jafa’s concept of ‘Black Visual Intonation’:when the wave of images and footage are in synchrony with the entropic, haunting tonalities of the work. Music is essential to this endeavour. Musical icons appear as magnificent spectres – ghostly entities of cultural life that move momentarily into the present, their being kept as an elusive and recalcitrant tremor.

If Jafa’s film works are characterised by their adherence to – or departure from – a liquid flow, then his sculptural and image-based works are prominent outcrops within this, enacting historical interruptions through abstracted and recombined images. Working with paint for the first time, Jafa addresses the hierarchy of this medium, depicting Kurt Cobain’s body looming from an obscure black space, while nearby, hip-hop artist Foxy Brown is illuminated, holding court over her audience. Jafa indexes the pain accompanying their fame, embedding it within harvested and layeredart historical references. Each work reverberates a particular time and place across blurred temporalities, surfacing asa form of mythic heroism. Formulating a fluid visual architecture and a ‘prismatic truth’ of Blackness, Jafa has carved anew vernacular for the 21st century. 1

1 Arthur Jafa in conversation with Helen Molesworth, Love is The Message, The Message is Death, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, LosAngeles, 2016

Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ.