ART CITIES:Stockholm-Arthur Jafa
Over the past 30-years, 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.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
The title of Arthur Jafa’s solo exhibition, “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions”, is related to the sense of absence that Jafa observes as haunting Black life. The word ‘rendition’ refers to the artist’s interpretation of the aesthetics associated with Black being, which are historically-inscribed in images, objects and artefacts. By re-performing these narratives in the present, Jafa imagined and constructed new possibilities for making them visible. After 20-years in film, Arthur Jafa has stepped onto the art scene. In his works, he reveals the history of American racism and explores the historic and contemporary conditions for African-American visual culture. Since the early 2000s, Arthur Jafa has worked mainly as an artist and visionary to create an African-American visual culture. Arthur Jafa’s narratives go way back in American history, to the imprints left on the people and the culture by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “How can I make black cinema with the same power, beauty, and alienation as black music?” is a question that underpins his entire creative process, Jafa says. It was the seven-minute video “Love is the Message, the Message is Death”, accompanied by Kanye West’s track “Ultralight Beam, that brought Arthur Jafa his major public breakthrough. The video was released in autumn 2016, only a few days after Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the USA. In his videos and photographs, Arthur Jafa often explores historic moments where the African-American population were exposed to discrimination and false accusations. The work Jonathan relates to an event that took place on 7/8/1970 in California, in which a young man named Jonathan P. Jackson broke into the courthouse to negotiate the freedom of the Soledad Brothers*. The attempted breakout led to the kidnapping of the court judge Harold Haley, and a shootout that left four men dead, including Jackson and Haley. Jafa enlarged an archival photograph from the Marin Independent Journal to produce a fragmented rendition of the incident. “Pledge of Allegiance” 1899 (2017) is a photo wallpaper, where Arthur Jafa used a photograph from 1899-1900 of a group of African-American children in Virginia saluting the American flag with one arm raised. The similarities with the salute of the Third Reich meant that this gesture was abolished in 1942, the same year it was decided that it was unconstitutional to force pupils to pledge allegiance to the flag. “Monster” (1988) is one of several self-portraits in the exhibition, and demonstrates Jafa’s interest in examining the prevalence of the white gaze in the output of photography and film. Does it matter if a black person is behind the camera, when the camera itself serves as a tool for the white gaze? For his exhibition at Moderna Museet, Jafa has invited the photographer Ming Smith and the visual artist Frida Orupabo, and incorporated material from Missylanyus’ Youtube channel, to create an audio-visual experience that is both politically reflective and visionary. Ming Smith has been a photographer since the early 1970s. Her most notable images include expressive portraits of prominent artists and performers along with soft, painterly street photographies from New York, where she lives. For this exhibition, Arthur Jafa has selected some twenty of Smith’s photographs, spanning from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Frida Orupabo has developed an artistic practice in recent years, comprising digital collages, which she publishes in her Instagram flow under @nemiepeba, a virtual place where Orupabo challenges and deconstructs the white gaze. The exhibition presents a few three-dimensional photographs in the form of cut-out figures. Arthur Jafa has also included material from Orupabo’s Instagram in his video works. Missylanyus: Arthur Jafa stumbled across Missylanyus’ Youtube channel by accident. Material from the channel is incorporated in the video work “Mix 1-4 _constantly evolving” (2017), which contains original and found footage that Jafa has mixed.
*The Soledad Brothers were three African-American inmates charged with the murder of a white prison guard at California’s Soledad Prison on 16/1/1970. George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were said to have murdered Mills in retaliation for the shooting deaths of three black prisoners during a prison fight in the exercise yard three days prior by another guard.
Info: Curators: Amira Gad and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Stockholm, Duration: 29/6-8/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.modernamuseet.se
