Arthur Jafa - MAGNUMB
Louisiana Publications
Arthur Jafa has made a name for himself as an American video artist with themes like Black American culture, slavery and the opposition Black Americans face to this very day being at centre of his artistic explorations.
The release of the book MAGNUMB followed an Arthur Jafa exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which is not only known in terms of modern Danish architecture for its synthesisizing landscape, architecture and art but also for harbouring an extensive permanent collection of modern art spanning the last hundred years along with its comprehensive programme of special exhibitions.
Given the aforementioned, it is not for nothing included in Patricia Schultz’s book “One thousand Places to See Before You Die”, ranking within the first one hundred in the realm of art museums.
Louisisana’s book on Jafa accompanied and contextualised his exhibition with an overview of his often confronting video depictions of Black American life, which are informed by his lifelong fascination with imagery, photographs and cinematography and which have been catapulted to the forefront once Black Lives Matter became a global movement that found its way into prime-time media, thereby entering every facet of mainstream culture.
It is interesting to see Jafa’s cinematography within an art context, as it conveys both the beauty and power as well as the alienation the broad scope of Black culture has been experiencing. What I like about Jafa’s approach is that tackles American realities from different angles and thereby conveys a comprehensive multi-dimensional prism, through which the recipient is enabled to actively participate with his own interpretations.
The narrative of Jafa’s work is guided by stark contrasts, juxtapositions and an ubiquitous ambivalent openness, which invites to think beyond simple dichotomies of good and evil.
Apart from the political component, Jafa’s virtuosic technical skills enable him to masterfully compose new realities by creating a patchwork of nuances, the sum of which create a significant and visually coherent powerful whole that is much more than the mere sum of its components would have one think, with pain and suffering being a recurring motif and common denominator.
It is interesting to see Arthur Jafa incarnate at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art as the aestheticization of the traumas of white violence against Black people would have most likely been viewed by an exclusively privileged audience, thereby subversively raising deeper going questions about Denmark’s widely suppressed colonial history.
In essence, an ode in book form to an essential artist whose oeuvre engages the recipient in questioning the status quo and the role one plays in the maintenance of it.
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image from publisher website
