Arthur Jafa

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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 25^th 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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