Arthur Jafa

Born 1960 | Tupelo
Lives and works Los Angeles

In his wide-ranging practice that encompasses film, photography, and installation, Arthur Jafa contemplates the lived realities of African Americans. Jafa’s project shown at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, entitled LOML 2022, is an homage to the late Greg Tate (1957–2021), a writer and musician who was one of Jafa’s closest collaborators. Unlike his earlier works that showed striking images of Black bodies undergoing shared experiences of violence or joy, this film is an abstract, meditative flow of images that capture light and shadow against two distinctive tracks of sound playing simultaneously. The undecipherable shapes of the image and the discordance between the two soundtracks produce an eerie sensation that evokes mourning and grief.

Arthur Jafa, LOML 2022. Single-channel video, colour, sound. 11 mins, 32 secs. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Film still. Image courtesy the artist