Arthur Jafa

Three films by Arthur Jafa that belong to the Pinault Collection are being screened for the first time ever in Paris, as part of the "Corps et âmes" exhibition.. In the Rotunda, Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) transforms the space into a sounding board for the music and commitment of African-American icons such as Martin Luther King Jr, Jimi Hendrix, Barack Obama and Beyoncé, giving them universal appeal. The artist is also taking over Galerie 2 and the museum’s Studio, inviting visitors to become one with his films.

Across various media, the work of Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa embraces and celebrates Black American culture for all its nobility. From Barack Obama to gospel, from Aretha Franklin to the Black Lives Matter protests, by way of Miles Davis and Arthur Jafa delves into mass media and pop culture to construct a collage and montage aesthetic that recalls his role as an image collector and which brings together multiple references. He majestically presents the icons of black culture, as he struggles with the complex history of the United States.

In the Rotunda
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, 2016

In this film, Arthur Jafa is not paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “The medium is the message”. He is instead appropriating the idea of zapping. The work features a vivid, gripping montage of icons of Black American culture (such as Michael Jordan, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Miles Davis, and Malcolm X) alternating with anonymous figures, such as a young girl, protesters, and citizens being arrested. Through various physical situations — dance, combat, work, and violence — the montage, interspersed with the appearance of an incandescent sun, creates a powerful associative sense of momentum that melds celebrity and anonymity to write a common destiny, that of Black people and of the United States. It is an attempt to unify identity, marked by a voice, a vibrant breath of mutual support that runs through all these characters, as reminiscent of slave chants as it is of a quest for unity.

Love is the Message, the Message is Death is considered one of Arthur Jafa’s key works. Dating from 2016, it represents for the artist the affirmation of an African American identity, one of solidarity and confidence, while also showing and denouncing the violence that it has often faced.

It includes a piece of music titled Ultralight Beam from Kanye West’s album The Life of Pablo, which was released that same year. This composition, which combines gospel and R&B sounds, is an ode to spirituality, reconciliation, and the search for light, and it was praised as such by critics and a very wide audience upon its release. Arthur Jafa specifically chose this song for the values of hope and peace that it promotes.

Pinault Collection condemns Kanye West’s recent statements and actions in the strongest possible terms.

In Gallery 2
AGHDRA, 2021

A sequence of shots and musical sequences, AGHDRA is a contemplation of an ocean of unknown, unidentifiable material somewhere between plastic, asphalt, and magma, over which a star on the horizon sometimes floats. The indeterminate soundtrack consists of tiny variations in bass notes, while the waves continue their incessant to-and-fro beneath thissort of crushed, toxic crust which acts as a screen that prevents any light or any life from shining through. Two worlds seem to be separated by this opaque layer: a living, moving one imprisoned in the shallows and a peaceful nothingness. This strange melancholy evokes Rothko’s last works from his final, depressed phase, in which he forsook all colour and hope. AGHDRA is a work about the human condition in which the voice that rises up, like that of soul singers, is stifled and reduced to an indiscernible cry of pain that is impossible to articulate because it lacks space under this moving ceiling. It is impossible for these voices to propagate and for the message to arrive to those who need to hear it.

In the Studio
akingdoncomethas, 2018

Allegorical, political, mystical and pop, over the course of 100 minutes his filmic essay akingdoncomethas (2018) intertwines the Evangelical fervour of natural disasters, the sun merging with LAFD (firefighters of Los Angeles) helicopter flights, Aretha Franklin with messianic gospel choirs, and crowds in a trance induced by R&B performances. Here we find most of the recurrent figures and symbols of his work: the sun, incandescence, Black music, suffering and a certain notion of the tragic or even eschatology, where the world seems to be at a crossroads or a moment of fatal breakaway. In Arthur Jafa’s work there is an idea of postmodernity that recycles images not to extract new meaning or a theory from them but, on the contrary, shake off the restricted meaning in favour of a shifting, changing, open, legible and dynamic emotion.

Curated by: Matthieu Humery, Advisor of Photography