Arthur Jafa, artist, cinematographer and A-list collaborator, remembers vividly the first time he saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, aged 11, growing up in Mississippi. “I come out of it, literally, in a daze,” he remembers, “and I see the manager of the theatre, this white guy … I walked over to him and I said: ‘Excuse me, sir, I just came out of that movie, and, er, can you tell me what it was about?’ He just looked over his newspaper, and said: ‘Son, I’ve been looking at it all week and I don’t have a clue.’ That film was so deep that it levelled the differences between me and that guy. In the back of my head, I was thinking: ‘How do you generate that effect on people?’”
Jafa, an energetic speaker, the kind you suspect has more ideas in a minute than most people have in their lifetime, has spent his career challenging himself to do just that. He worked with Kubrick on his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, with Spike Lee on Crooklyn, and with his ex-wife Julie Dash on her 1992 film Daughters of the Dust, the story of a Gullah family in South Carolina, which was later studied by Beyoncé for the visuals in her film-album Lemonade.
Other credits include director of photography on videos for Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky, work on Beyoncé’s Formation and an upcoming project with Jay Z. In short, Jafa, 56, is the prime example of someone whose work you probably know even if you don’t know his name. It’s possible that may change this month, with Jafa’s first UK solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Titled A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, its mix of photography, film and social media elements mean that it’s likely to court visitors beyond the usual art crowd.
Jafa first rocked the art world last year with Love is the Message, the Message is Death, a seven-minute film collage set to a soundtrack of Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam. It splices the 2015 footage of a white police officer shooting unarmed black 50-year-old Walter Scott with 60s civil rights demonstrations, Beyoncé dancing on a balcony in a KALE sweatshirt with artist Martine Syms’s Mundane Afrofuturist manifesto, and Drake on stage followed by Malcolm X. The result is an immersive and angry narrative of the African-American experience. The New Yorker called it Jafa’s “crucial ode to black America” and dubbed it “required viewing”.
Jafa himself is reticent. “I mean, it’s very much obviously concerned and preoccupied with black people being shot down like dogs, that’s for sure,” he says. “But it’s also obviously about how magnificent black people are, you know? We are treated in a certain fashion and we respond in a certain fashion. And I think the way we respond is superhuman.”
Originally training as an architect, Jafa moved into film-making for Daughters of the Dust, which became the first film by an African-American woman to be distributed across the US. The film has been rediscovered – and is back in cinemas 25 years after its release – thanks to Lemonade, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who credits it as an influence. Jafa, however, rues the years of obscurity, when Dash struggled to find financing. He has a theory about why someone like Dash failed to launch when a young white director might have succeeded. “It’s about black potension,” he says, “like ‘potential’ and ‘tension’ as a word. Where the ability to actualise one’s capacity has been arrested.”
These days, Jafa has increasingly moved into visual art, with the odd foray into video-directing for members of the Knowles-Carter clan. Arguably, his success is part of a wider shift suggesting the art world’s closed doors are opening just a crack, with two black artists included in the Turner prize shortlist and a Black Power exhibition opening at Tate Modern next month.
Jafa’s point of view as a black artist addressing black issues in a typically white arena is, ultimately, what works for him. “I hope I’m being as radical as I can about people’s assumptions about what black people are,” he says. “I’m also not speaking to white people. I mean, that’s a core secret of everything I do; I never speak to white people, I always speak to black people.”
Arthur Jafa’s A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions is at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, W2 to Sunday 10 September
