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.

A kaleidoscopic survey of black satire in 20th- and 21st-century American art In this groundbreaking study, Richard J. Powell investigates the visual forms of satire produced by black artists in 20th- and 21st-century America. Underscoring the historical use of visual satire as antiracist dissent and introspective critique, Powell argues that it has a distinctly African American lineage. Taking on some of the most controversial works of the past century—in all their complexity, humor, and provocation—Powell raises important questions about the social power of art. Expansive in both historical reach and breadth of media presented, Going There interweaves discussions of such works as the midcentury cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the installations of Kara Walker, the paintings of Robert Colescott, and the movies of Spike Lee. Other artists featured in the book include David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Beverly McIver, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, and Carrie Mae Weems. Thoroughly researched and rich in context, Going There is essential reading in the history of satire, racial politics, and contemporary art.

From 1971 to 1978 the author, a Dane, hitchiked across more than 100,000 miles of America. This volume, written at the journey's end, contains some 700 of the photographs he took, and describes his odyssey.

Universal Tongue' celebrates the great diversity of the global dance kaleidoscope in the era of the Internet. It was born from visual artist Anouk Kruithof?s fascination with dance videos distributed online as a representation of self-expression, cultural identity, empowerment and fun.00In collaboration with a team of 50 researchers from across the globe, she sourced over 8800 dance videos online, which were edited down to a 1000 unique dance styles that she blended into a dynamic 8 channel video installation with a four hour duration, accompanied by a unifying soundtrack. The researchers provided a short text for each dance style presented in their found videos. These 1000 edited texts combined with screenshots taken from the videos introduce the origin, background and meaning of the dance styles. Et voilà! this ?dancyclopedia? through the jungle of the Internet was born!00This book shows how dance can be a way of knowing about the world. It is by no means exclusive, final, or academic. It is a statement. Organized in alphabetical order by the first letter of each dance style, it confirms the horizontality of 'Universal Tongue', by erasing typical categories of the world order, such as country, continent, or culture. Instead, it points us towards a more inclusive world with a limitless exchange ? a world where simply everyone is a dancer.

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).

Working closely with her subjects on setting, lighting, and pose, photographer Deana Lawson creates intimate depictions of Black bodies interacting in both public and private spaces. The resulting images are formally rigorous in terms of composition--every detail is meticulous and motivated--as well as suggestive of Lawson's personal connection with those she photographs. In Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana, two women--twin sisters--kneel in the center of a wide bed, facing away from each other, their backs touching. Each raises one arm above her head, gently touching her sister's hand, in a choreographed posture evocative of a stylized sculpture or a ritualistic, dancelike gesture. Both look toward the camera, but their expressions are not identical, and indeed the entire image is a study in similarity and difference.