Arthur Jafa

About Arthur Jafa

At the forefront of thinking through how Blackness is rendered, imagined and lived in society, artist, filmmaker and theorist Arthur Jafa draws from a substantial film and still image archive he has been assembling since the 1980s, to make bold, visceral films and room-size installations that lay bare anguish, outrage, power, history, cultural memory, rupture, pleasure, and repair. Placing one resonant cultural artifact – footage whether newly shot or found – next to another, through astute juxtaposition of images and ideas, coupled with lyrical, syncopated editing, he renders both the beauty of a ‘new harmonic’ and searing critique. Renowned for his cinematography – a body of work that includes Julie Dash’s seminal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, films by Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah, and music videos for Solange Knowles and Jay-Z – Jafa creates work that approximates the radical power, beauty, and alienation of Black life in the West, while seeking to make visible (or emancipate) the power embedded in modes of African expression.