“I have a very simple mantra and it’s this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music… The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.” — Arthur Jafa

To open his new exhibition in Berkeley—ARTHUR JAFA/MATRIX 272, which features a new work The White Album (above)—Jafa will be joined by Stephen Best for a conversation about the politics of aesthetics and the turn toward “Afropessimism.”

 

ARTHUR JAFA AND STEPHEN BEST IN CONVERSATION

Wednesday, December 12, at 6 pm.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

2155 Center Street, Berkeley.

Above: Arthur Jafa, The White Album (still), 2018. Continuous video projection; color, sound; approx. 40 min. Commissioned by BAMPFA. © Arthur Jafa, 2018.

Below: Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1989. Digital c-print. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. (Jafa is the subject of this photograph.)

Images courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York and Rome.