An exhibition featuring the work of the acclaimed US filmmaker, cinematographer and artist Arthur Jafa in his first solo UK exhibition. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.
“How do we imagine things that are lost? What kind of legacy can we imagine despite that loss and despite the absence of things that never were?” Arthur Jafa
Jafa’s work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop a specifically black visual aesthetics equal to the ‘power, beauty and alienation’ of black music in US culture?
This new exhibition, titled A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, will take the form of a site-specific installation at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, while also expanding beyond the Gallery to the peripheries of the city with a series of performances, screenings and events in venues or areas of London that function for Jafa as ‘black sites’.
Jafa strives to create 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 material expressivity. With reference points ranging from Fang sculpture to Mississippi juke joints, Duchamp’s urinal and jazz, he is widely recognised as a film and video maker with a uniquely black understanding of how to cut and juxtapose a sequence in order to draw out maximum effect.
| Duration | 08 June 2017 - 10 September 2017 |
| Times | 10am - 6pm, Tuesday - Sunday, plus bank holidays |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Serpentine North Gallery |
| Address | West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London, W2 2AAR |
| Contact | / information@serpentinegallery.org / www.serpentinegallery.org |