Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272

December 12, 2018–March 24, 2019

A gallery exhibition and complementary screenings of videos by Arthur Jafa, whose work expands the concept of black cinema while exploring African American experience and race relations in everyday life.

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Arthur Jafa: Still from The White Album, 2018; continuous video projection; color, sound; approx. 40 min.; commissioned by BAMPFA. Photo courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome. © Arthur Jafa, 2018.

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Past Events

Select Wednesdays and Thursdays
Arthur Jafa Notebook Viewing Hour

Peruse a series of the artist's notebooks, which offer insight into his singular approach, in the Works on Paper Study Center.

BAMPFA
Wednesday, December 12, 6 PM
Arthur Jafa and Stephen Best in Conversation

MATRIX artist Arthur Jafa and UC Berkeley professor Stephen Best talk about the move from the cinema screen to the gallery, the politics of aesthetics, and the turn toward “Afropessimism.”

BAMPFA

Past Films

Dreams Are Colder Than Death
Arthur Jafa
United States, 2013
Wednesday, February 27 7 PM
Arthur Jafa and Leigh Raiford in Conversation
Fifty years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, African American filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals reflect on where the civil rights struggle stands today in Jafa’s moving work. With short New Soul Rebel: Adrian Younge.
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Affective Proximity: Films by Arthur Jafa and Others
Thursday, February 28 7 PM
Arthur Jafa and Greg Tate in Conversation
Films that explore the effects of violence on black individuals and communities while also depicting their beauty, power, and resilience: Jafa’s APEX and Cassowary, Dawn Suggs’s Chasing the Moon, Ben Caldwell’s I and I, and more.
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Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272

December 12, 2018–March 24, 2019

Arthur Jafa is an artist, director, editor, and award-winning cinematographer whose poignant work expands the concept of black cinema while exploring African American experience and race relations in everyday life. He has stated, “I have a very simple mantra and it’s this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.” In his renowned work Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), he rendered a masterful compilation of found footage set to Kanye West’s transcendent, gospel-inspired hip-hop track “Ultralight Beam.” The result was a meticulously edited seven-minute montage that surveys African American identity through a vast spectrum of imagery, drawing from media sources such as the news, photography, the Internet, and television. Intercutting segments of his own footage with more well-known pictures from the civil rights era, recent scenes of police brutality, and iconic clips...

MATRIX 272 features both a gallery installation and two evening programs of video screenings in BAMPFA’s Barbro Osher Theater. In the theater, videos Jafa has made over the last decade, including the documentary essay Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2013), screen alongside work he has selected made by others. The exhibition also debuts a newly commissioned video, The White Album (2018), on view in BAMPFA’s galleries. If Love Is The Message trained Jafa’s scrutiny on black experience, The White Album shifts his lens to white experience, acknowledging that neither can be understood in isolation from the another. Again, he combines imagery from a wide array of sources, from music videos to confessionals posted to YouTube, to produce a trenchant examination of race relations in the United States.

Reflecting the artist’s interest in found images and affective collage, the exhibition includes a series of notebooks that Jafa began assembling in the 1990s, which offer unique insight into his singular approach. The notebooks are on view in the Florence Helzel Works on Paper Study Center on the museum's lower level Wednesdays 12–1, Thursdays 5–6, and by appointment. Submit an appointment request.

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Download the exhibition brochure (PDF)

Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272 is co-organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator, and Kate MacKay, associate film curator, with Matthew Coleman, curatorial assistant. The MATRIX Program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis and the continued support of the BAMPFA Trustees. Additional support provided by Meyer Sound. The screenings in the Barbro Osher Theater are presented with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Supporter

National Endowment for the Arts

Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272

December 12, 2018–March 24, 2019

Selected Exhibition Objects

Dreams Are Colder Than Death

Arthur Jafa

Dreams Are Colder Than Death

Arthur Jafa

APEX

Arthur Jafa

Past Events

Arthur Jafa Notebook Viewing Hour

Arthur Jafa and Stephen Best in Conversation

Past Films

Dreams Are Colder Than Death

Affective Proximity: Films by Arthur Jafa and Others