Arthur Jafa’s video collages ask viewers to look at images they might otherwise turn away from.
The artist’s New Museum survey, I Am Tony, uses moving images, photographs and found material to confront the ways Black life has been represented and misrepresented in American culture. Jafa is perhaps best known for Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, his 2016 video montage set to Kanye West’s gospel-inflected “Ultralight Beam.”
His practice borrows the grammar of the music sample: an image made elsewhere acquires a different force when placed beside another. That method can produce startling tenderness, but also jarring changes in tone. An exhibition of Jafa’s work is less a tidy retrospective than an argument about who gets to assemble a culture’s images.
The retrospective is scheduled to run through January 4, 2027.
Image: Arthur Jafa installation image, via Hypebeast. Source and further details.
