Contemporary Icon

Arthur Jafa's akingdoncomethas special screenings at Teatrino Grassi
by Mariachiara Marzari
  • friday, 8 september 2023

Arthur Jafa’s videos always look like what we0d been waiting for. The artist creates what he defines a kind of filmmaking that “attempts to replicate the power, the beauty, and the alienation of black music”, a way to make the body feel the picture with the same sensuality of sound pitch and verbal tone. Jafa’s art goes in and out of the worlds of cinema, art, and music, never settling in any of them. His language is purely contemporary, his contents are always an emanation of African-American culture, and his images undergo continuous transformation.
The transformation is both formal, inasmuch editing juxtaposes one thing after the other so that viewers store in their memory more than one image at a time, and pictorial. Arthur Jafa’s akingdoncomethas (2018, 105’) will be screened on September 8, 9, and 10 at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi as a spin-off of art exhibition Icônes, produced at Punta della Dogana. akingdoncomethas is a collection of clips taht the artist found on the internet. The clips show pastors delivering their sermons and gospel choirs. Using these sequences, the artist made the ethics and aesthetics of Pentecostal Christianity emerge: vibrato voices, the slow delivering of testimony, the wailing, the crying, the reflecting. The audience is left with the awareness of what these churches do, as well as of how the churchgoers feel, which is maybe what counts the most. Free admission, limited seats.

akingdoncomethas di Arthur Jafa
8, 9, 10 September h. 10.15/12/13.45/15.30/17.15
Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venezia
www.pinaultcollection.com

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