Artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo) has been assembling his substantial catalogue of film and imagery since the 1980s, serving as a rich repository and springboard for still images, videos, paintings and sculptures that celebrate and reflect Black life in America and beyond. Jafa, who studied architecture and filmmaking, choreographs both cinematic and physical space in his visceral, hallucinatory films and expansive installations. He sequences and forces into dialogue fragmented extracts from disparate visuals, including social media videos, low-resolution television recordings, celebrity interviews, raw footage of police encounters, cartoons and video game content. Jafa explores and approximates icons, brutalities and aesthetics associated with Black culture, the radical power of Afro-American music and the prevalence of a white gaze in Western cinema. He forms astute juxtapositions and sensory experiences that heighten emotive responses to the real events and histories portrayed, encouraging witness, empathy and confrontation.
