Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) 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.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 American culture?Building upon Jafa's image-based practice, this enormous 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.With over 30 contributors including: art critic Dave Hickey, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, award-winning British artist John Akomfrah, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als.Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June - 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February - 25 November 2018).

An essential overview of Jafa's sweeping, dynamic and disquieting video portraits of Black American life Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text "My Black Death": "The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced." This essential overview presents Jafa's best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Deathand its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars. Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa(born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dustwon him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives in Los Angeles.

Ming Smith's poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Smith moved to New York in the 1970s and began to make images charged with startling beauty and spiritual energy. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith's work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance--from the "Pittsburgh Cycle" plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith's singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts

This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities. Refusing any disciplinary coherence, this book assembles texts from multifarious eras and origins. At the same time, the contributors share an urgency to question the dichotomy of original creation and derivative appropriation. In this way, the book itself is a cut-up of previously published essays and articles that in their proximity allow for multiple readings to arise. It aims to translate the topic into a wider societal discourse to serve as both a source of inspiration and a platform for critical reflection. Contributors Thom Bettridge, Marcus Boon, Nicolas Bourriaud, Lars Eckstein, Rachel Falconer, Lukas Feireiss, Joerg Koch, Jonathan Lethem, Lucas Mascatello, Paul D. Miller, Eduardo Navas, Tamar Shafrir, Robert Shore, Stacey Waite, and Jan Verwoert Copublished with Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam

"Analogy, Attunement, and Attention brings together a uniquely contemporary and diverse set of voices to address the complex sets of relationships that the photograph creates between its viewers and their bodies, minds, and sense of the physical and metaphysical world. This volume examines our changing relationship to space and selfhood as mediated by the lens, the print, the screen, the computer, and the multitude of networked technologies built around the image"--

A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.