Arthur Jafa - A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions

Arthur Jafa - A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions

Author: Arthur Jafa

Publisher: Walther Kanig, Kaln

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 848

ISBN-13: 9783960981589

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Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) 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.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 American culture?Building upon Jafa's image-based practice, this enormous new volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life.Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa's artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.With over 30 contributors including: art critic Dave Hickey, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, award-winning British artist John Akomfrah, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als.Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June - 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February - 25 November 2018).


Arthur Jafa: Magnumb

Arthur Jafa: Magnumb

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9788793659353

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An essential overview of Jafa's sweeping, dynamic and disquieting video portraits of Black American life Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text "My Black Death": "The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced." This essential overview presents Jafa's best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Deathand its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars. Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa(born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dustwon him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives in Los Angeles.


Ming Smith: an Aperture Monograph

Ming Smith: an Aperture Monograph

Author: Ming Smith

Publisher: Aperture

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781597114820

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Ming Smith's poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Smith moved to New York in the 1970s and began to make images charged with startling beauty and spiritual energy. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith's work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance--from the "Pittsburgh Cycle" plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith's singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts


Radical Cut-up

Radical Cut-up

Author: Lukas Feireiss

Publisher: Sternberg Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783956795152

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This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities. Refusing any disciplinary coherence, this book assembles texts from multifarious eras and origins. At the same time, the contributors share an urgency to question the dichotomy of original creation and derivative appropriation. In this way, the book itself is a cut-up of previously published essays and articles that in their proximity allow for multiple readings to arise. It aims to translate the topic into a wider societal discourse to serve as both a source of inspiration and a platform for critical reflection. Contributors Thom Bettridge, Marcus Boon, Nicolas Bourriaud, Lars Eckstein, Rachel Falconer, Lukas Feireiss, Joerg Koch, Jonathan Lethem, Lucas Mascatello, Paul D. Miller, Eduardo Navas, Tamar Shafrir, Robert Shore, Stacey Waite, and Jan Verwoert Copublished with Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam


The Lives of Images, Vol. II: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

The Lives of Images, Vol. II: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

Author: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Publisher: Lives of Images

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781597115070

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"Analogy, Attunement, and Attention brings together a uniquely contemporary and diverse set of voices to address the complex sets of relationships that the photograph creates between its viewers and their bodies, minds, and sense of the physical and metaphysical world. This volume examines our changing relationship to space and selfhood as mediated by the lens, the print, the screen, the computer, and the multitude of networked technologies built around the image"--


The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776–1923

The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776–1923

Author: David S. Katz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3319410601

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This book is about the principal writings that shaped the perception of Turkey for informed readers in English, from Edward Gibbon’s positing of imperial Decline and Fall to the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), illustrating how Turkey has always been a part of the modern British and European experience. It is a great sweep of a story: from Gibbon as standard textbook, through Lord Bryon the pro-Turkish poet, and Benjamin Disraeli the Romantic novelist of all things Eastern, followed by John Buchan's Greenmantle First World War espionage fantasies, and then Manchester Guardian reporter Arnold Toynbee narrating the fight for Turkish independence.


Jaguars and Electric Eels

Jaguars and Electric Eels

Author: Alexander von Humboldt

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2007-02-01

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 0141967145

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A great, innovative and restless thinker, the young Humboldt (1769-1859) went on his epochal journey to the New World during a time of revolutionary ferment across Europe. This part of his matchless narrative of adventure and scientific research focuses on his time in Venezuela - in the Llanos and on the Orinoco River - riding and paddling, restlessly and happily noting the extraordinary things on every hand. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.


Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Author: Saidiya Hartman

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0393357627

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A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.


Alvaro Siza Veira. (in) Discipline

Alvaro Siza Veira. (in) Discipline

Author: Nuno Grande

Publisher: Walther Konig Verlag

Published: 2019-12-30

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9783960987024

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The essential survey on Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alvaro Siza's restless creativity, in 30 projects over the past 60 years Once, on the inner flap of one of his sketchbooks, Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect and educator Alvaro Siza (born 1933) described himself and his work with self-deprecating disavowal. Rather than identifying his discipline as architecture, he identified it as "as little as possible." This confessional note is the point of departure for Alvaro Siza: (In)Discipline, a retrospective survey that highlights the currents of disquiet and insubordination within the renowned architect's creative method and production, surveying Siza's design process through a selection of 30 of his projects, built and unbuilt, spanning more than six decades. The publication starts with Siza's first works in Matonsinhos--the Four Dwellings in Matosinhos (1957), the Boa Nova Tea House (1963) and the Ocean Swimming Pool in Leça da Palmeira, Portugal (1973)--and includes recently completed work and projects under construction, including the Mimesis Museum in South Korea (2009), the Church in Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande, France (2018) and the Residential Tower in New York (ongoing), his first project in the US.