Arthur Jafa, Polymathic Chronicler of Black America, Joins Sprüth Magers

September 13, 2024

Arthur Jafa, the filmmaker, artist, and cinematographer feted for his elegant excavations of American race politics, has signed with Sprüth Mather. Jafa’s first exhibition with Sprüth Muter opens tomorrow in Los Angeles, one of the gallery’s four locations worldwide. Jafa will continue to be represented by New York-based Gladstone Gallery.

“We are very happy to be working with Arthur Jafa,” Monika Sprüth said in a statement ARTnews. “His multidisciplinary approach to image-making, and his work’s strong conceptual roots, are very much in keeping with artists of the gallery, from John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer and Rosemarie Trockel to younger generations such as Cao Fei, Anne Imhof and Martine Syms.”

Over his 30-year practice, the Mississippi-born Jafa has remixed and reimagined sonic and visual artifacts of America, as personally experienced. He won international acclaim with the 2016 film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, which premiered in Harlem days after Donald Trump was elected president, elevating the one-time artist’s artist into the chief cataloguer of Black American culture. Recently, though, he declined conventional notions of archiving in the context of his work, telling The Art Newspaper: “When things [are in an archive], they are policed and officiated…But life is inherently archival. If it’s that imminent, what’s the point of even describing it as archival? So, I’m a little resist to that narrative.”

Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death consists of sharply spliced clips from police body cameras, broadcast segments, civil rights demonstrations, basketball games, and concerts, all set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”. The film, like much of his oeuvre, presented a complex portrait of Black joy and pain; in 2020, when the country was violently, defiantly divided over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, 13 museums screened the film for 48 hours.

Jafa won the 2019 Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for The White Album (208), a 30-minute collage of found and personal footage that explores Black-white relations which, per his message, can even at their best be awkward—and at their worst, deadly.

“Just as the film critiques a moment fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s friends and family, it also speaks to our capacity for love,” the jury wrote.

For his upcoming exhibition with Sprug Mathers, the artist will present his newest film BEN GAZARRA (2024), which reimagines pivotal scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, as well as other recent works across disciplines.

“We have been following AJ’s work for many years and are continually astounded at his ability to poignantly distill so many visual, historical and theoretical elements into his practice,” Philomene Magers said in a statement to ARTnews. “We look forward to supporting his future projects internationally, beginning with this important exhibition in the city where he has lived and worked for so many years.”