Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
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Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions

This catalogue is published to accompany Arthur Jafa’s exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries: A Series of Utterly Improbably, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (8 June – 10 September 2017) that travelled to the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin (11 February – 25 November 2018).

Over the past three decades, the American filmmaker, cinematographer and artist, Arthur Jafa, has developed a dynamic and multidisciplinary career that is centred upon questions of identity and race. Jafa creates films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Through his research, he asks how we might identify a specific set of aesthetics that is modelled on the centrality of Black music to America’s cultural history. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is the recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent ‘power, beauty and alienation’ embedded within forms of Black music?

Building upon Jafa’s image-based practice, this new volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life. Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa’s artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.

The commissioned writers in this book provide great insight into Jafa’s practice: Ernest Hardy’s text offers new insight into Jafa’s work Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, whilst Tina Campt’s ‘The Visual Frequency of Black Life’ questions the sound of images and the frequency of black vernacular photography. Fred Moten has written a lyrical piece titled ‘Black Topological Existence’ and John Akomfrah expands on the ideas of Black aesthetics or experience and the artist’s use of image archives.

 

 

Authors

Fred Moten

Tina M. Campt

Ernest Hardy

John Akomfrah

Arthur Jafa

Lucius Shepard

James Tiptree, JR.

Saidiya Hartman

Dionne Brand

Sylvia Wynter

Akwaeke Emezi

Leo Bersani

Dave Hickey

Judith Butler

Hortense J. Spillers

Jean Baudrillard

Amiri Baraka

Greg Tate

Samuel R. Delany

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Nathaniel Mackey

Cecil Taylor

NourbeSe Philip

Paolo Bacigalupi

Hilton Als

Jerzy Grotowski

CM Burroughs

John Keene

Greil Marcus

Henry Dumas

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yana Peel

 

Editors

Amira Gad

Joseph Constable

 

Associate Editors

Janine Armin

 

Copy Editor

Melissa Larner

 

Designer

OSK

 

Dimensions

27,4 x 33,9 cm Portrait

 

Publishers

Serpentine Galleries, the Store X, Julia Stoschek Collection, and Koenig Books

 

ISBN

978-1-908617-44-6

 

Price

£ 70

 

Please note that customers outside of the UK may be required to pay import VAT and/or customs duty to their local courier company before receiving the goods.

Arthur Jafa

See more products by   Arthur Jafa

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960 in America) has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice, ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.

‘How do we imagine things that are lost? What kind of legacy can we imagine despite that loss and despite the absence of things that never were?’ –Arthur Jafa

Jafa’s work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop a specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the ‘power, beauty and alienation’ of Black music in US culture?

 Jafa originally trained as an architect and made his cinematic debut as Director of Photography for Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust,  for which he won best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. As part of the BFI’s season Unbound: Visions of the Black Feminine,  a new restoration of Daughters of the Dust was released at selected cinemas across the UK on Friday 2 June to mark the film’s 25th anniversary – see the BFI website for more information.

Jafa has also collaborated with directors ranging from Spike Lee (Crooklyn,  1994) to John Akomfrah (Seven Songs for Malcolm X, 1993), and artists including Kara Walker and Fred Moten. He has also been recognised for his work on the Solange Knowles videos, Don’t Touch My Hair  and Cranes in the Sky  (2016). Explaining his favourite medium, Jafa has said: “Film is one of the few things, particularly in the theatrical context, that takes up as much space as architecture but like music is fundamentally immaterial.”

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