Arthur Jafa
Love is the Message, The Message is Death
20 January–07 April 202420 Jan–07 Apr 2024
#ArthurJafa
In just seven-and-a-half minutes, Arthur Jafa’s roller-coaster montage video Love is the Message, The Message is Death encapsulates African American experience as a tale of resilience. It combines footage shot by Jafa—an artist with a long career as a cinematographer and director—with excerpts from films, newscasts, sports coverage, music clips, and citizen videos.
Scenes of trauma, racism, grief, and routine police violence are shuffled with others of joy, defiance, and creativity, including performances by exceptional black athletes, dancers, and musicians. Set to Kanye West’s emotional gospel anthem ‘Ultralight Beam’, it is a poignant, visceral, kaleidoscopic meditation on African American life, history, and identity.
Its title nods to the 1970s song ‘Love is the Message’ by MFSB (known from the television show Soul Train) and the 1973 science-fiction story ‘Love is the Plan and the Plan is Death’ by James Tiptree, Jr.
Love is the Message, The Message is Death exemplifies Jafa’s goal to craft a ‘black cinema’, with strong ties to music, responsive to the ‘existential, political, and spiritual’.
Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer. He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and is based in Los Angeles. His work engages and questions representations of Black being. He received the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale and the Best Cinematography award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. His work is held in collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
