Jafa first trained as an architect, but made his cinematic debut as Director of Photography for Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, for which he won best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. He has also collaborated with directors ranging from Spike Lee (Crooklyn, 1994) to John Akomfrah (Seven Songs for Malcolm X, 1993) and artists including Kara Walker and Fred Moten. He has also been recognised for his work on the Solange Knowles videos, Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky (2016). Explaining his favourite medium, Jafa has said: ‘Film is one of the few things, particularly in the theatrical context, that takes up as much space as architecture but like music is fundamentally immaterial.’
The exhibition is titled A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, and as with a lot of the work exhibited at the Sackler that I have seen is site-specific installation. Jafa has transformed the space with a collection of work that encompass film, photography and found footage that all relate to his central preoccupations. The Sackler on their web site describe the show "The title of the exhibition relates to the sense of absence that Jafa observes as haunting Black life. The word ‘rendition’ refers to the artist’s interpretation of the aesthetics associated with Black being, which are historically-inscribed in images, objects and artefacts. By re-performing these narratives in the present, Jafa imagines and constructs new possibilities for making them visible. Jafa creates work that approximates the radical alienation of Black life in the West while seeking to make visible or emancipate the power embedded in modes of African expression. With reference points ranging from Fang sculpture to Mississippi juke joints, Duchamp’s urinal to jazz, he is a filmmaker with a unique understanding of how to cut and juxtapose a sequence to draw out maximum visceral effect.
The exhibition worked well and also allowed for some interesting edits of your own to the show. To accompany you on your tour you were given headphones that were able to select the sound for the installation you were looking at and change this as you moved around. This leant itself to some interesting combinations of sound and image by putting it on the wrong setting. The idea was a good way of addressing the idea of noise pollution of AV works in a gallery.
A couple of Jafa's works really inspired me. One called Mix 2 Constantly Evolving was a collection of "found footage" that it was almost as if Jafa had curated to make one piece in the show. Exhibited on one screen it included an online soap opera featuring black characters and sterotypes of black relationships played out to the full. Another "Wildcat" by Kahlil Josepha moodily shot piece of Americana centres around the dust belt and cowboys but featuring black characters. This piece made use of all of the film tricks of slo-mo, high contrast and really played on the colours of black and white through mise-en-scene and especially costume. These were complemented by a very subjective mini documentary from the 1960's called Savages. It was about the Venice Oakwood projects and the white VO with images of a nice park states black people being uninspired, unintelligent and leading hard lives and that the "The Negro does it to himself". This was balanced by one black inhabitant stating about opportunities to get out of his situation "Not that don't wanna do, its that cannot do!". The contradictions between portrayal of the black and whites is frightening. There is then a short clip with a black man very visibly off his face chemically at an outdoor club looking and dancing manically. The last piece in this collection was 3 degrees to the proximity of disaster which was public footage of the Detroit marathon bombings. the sense of energy and horror is palpable in this.
I loved the way that Mix 2 Constantly Evolving used lots of found footage to build an idea as I mentioned in a curatorly way. This is definitely something I myself have been playing with for the Global Warmning installation BUT I am aiming to create all of the "found footage". Lessons learnt here are the variety of formats that make it more interesting. Art house B/W, online, archive and amateur public shot footage all combining to create a meaning.
Another one was very much in the vein of Craig Baldwin and the Media Jammer ideology and was made up by an AV assault on the audience. It was a rapid fire series of media, cultural (generally pop) and images and video clips edited together. It is similar to some ideas I was developing for an earlier Global Warmning piece. I loved the aggression and again the black rights and representational themes rang out in the piece but even though the work was unsubtle the message was certainly not. The juxtaposition of images alongside each other, Eisenstein's Soviet Montage style created collisions and new meaning.
An interesting part of the exhibition were all of the books with a wide range of imagery that Jafa uses to inspire his work. These are a set of source books of images he has been assembling since the 1980s and this ongoing archive has proved an enduring resource for his work. There were visuals, ideas, articles, headlines and these are an excellent idea and something I may have to adopt as a visual and conceptual inspirational library.
The exhibition also includes the work of three additional voices: the photographer Ming Smith, @nemiepeba - the Instagram feed of artist Frida Orupabo - and content from the YouTube channel of Missylanyus. Together, these three ‘platforms’ or ‘guests’ played against AND alongside Jafa’s own work and presentations throughout the Gallery.
What I will take from the exhibition and use to move my work forward.
- It is possible to address social/environmental issues in this case race but it does not have to be force fed. Jafa lines up the content and then lets you fill in the blanks. The collision of content and pieces being the equivalent to Eisenstein's collision of images in editing.
- I really liked the curating of the various clips that all combined to create a meaning. By placing them alongside one another as mentioned above they can come at an issue from different directions but complementing and enhance each other the end result being greater than the sum of its parts. The variety of these was key also.
- Start my own notebooks and collecting visual and conceptual ideas.
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