Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death
Arthur Jafa
31 May - 12 July
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays, 12 – 18h00
Please note that the exhibition will be closed on Sunday 1 June, but will reopen to the public on Saturday 7 June.
E-WERK Luckenwalde presents Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) by internationally acclaimed artist Arthur Jafa in its Turbine Hall. Jafa’s landmark work consists of footage shot by Jafa, a visual artist with a long career as a cinematographer and film director, as well as clips sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos, much of it downloaded from the Internet. The work is a searing, seven-minute collage of images traversing the twentieth century, focusing on the lives of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people set against the backdrop of systemic racism and white supremacism. This work is a powerful meditation on violence, joy, racism, Black pain, creativity and Black resilience.
The title is a layered reference to the classic house music track Love Is the Message by MFSB and the science-fiction short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death by James Tiptree Jr., a formative influence on Jafa in his youth. This combination of references helps to elucidate the penetrative ambivalence of the black experience inherent to Jafa’s work, which tracks the complex relationship of Black Americans with being American. Jafa describes the black experience as “a complex ball of things that are both magnificent and miserable”, entirely entangled and irreducible to binaries. Against the global backdrop of autocratic backlash and increasing socio-political polarisation, Jafa’s searing seven-minute masterpiece is a testament to the enduring power of black resilience and the urgent need for collective reckoning.
About Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in US culture? Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide. Select recent institutional solo exhibitions include MCA Chicago, Illinois (2024); OGR Torino, Italy (2022); LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2022); Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland (2021); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark (2021); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2020); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2020); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2019). In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.”
Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death by Arthur Jafa is supported by the City of Luckenwalde and Rebeam Projectors.
