Love is The Message, The Message is Death

On view in the Smith Gallery, and shown for the first time in the Southeast, is Arthur Jafa‘s critical video installation Love is The Message, The Message is Death. Jafa creates moving works of power and beauty using charged, found video clips, to reflect on black representation in mainstream media. Although only 7 minutes 25 seconds in length, the video installation, set to Kanye West’s stirring, gospel-inspired song “Ultralight Beam,” presents glimpses into the joys and traumas of black life in the United States, which the artist sees as both beautiful and painful.

Artist, filmmaker, cinematographer, TNEG (motion picture studio) co-founder, Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and currently lives in Los Angeles. Renowned for his cinematography Jafa was the director of photography on Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994), Isaac Julien’s Darker Shade of Black (1994), A Litany for Survival (1995), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s biographical film on the late Audre Lorde, John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), a cinematographer for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Manthia Diawara’s Rouch in Reverse (2000), Nefertite Nguvu’s In the Morning (2014), shot second unit on Ava DuVernay’s Selma(2014) and was the director of photography for Solange’s music videos Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky (both 2016). In 2017, along with TNEG, Jafa conceived, shot and edited the music video for JAY-Z’s 4:44, the title track from his newest album. Dreams are Colder Than Death, a documentary directed and shot by Jafa to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, garnered acclaim at the LA Film Festival, NY Film Festival and Black Star Film Festival where it won Best Documentary. His writing on black cultural politics has appeared in various publications such as Black Popular Culture and Everything but the Burden, among others.

Jafa’s gallery work has been widely exhibited at Artists Space, New York, NY;  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; CCAC Institute, Oakland, CA Westaelischer Kunstvein, Münster, Germany; ARTPACE, San Antonio, TX; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, NY; and The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA to name a few. Jafa was recently featured in a solo exhibition entitled A Series of Utterly Improbably, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at The Serpentine Gallery in London in 2017 that will tour to the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin in 2018. His work is represented in prestigious private and public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The High Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Art in Boston, The Stedelijk Museum, The Perez Art Museum in Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

View the exhibition brocure below.