2nd floor - Lounge h3
For Arthur Jafa, "Being black means: pressure, intensity, pleasure, horror. Everything that everyone feels, but in a particular, concentrated version."
In May 2019, Arthur Jafa was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his radical and uncompromising work. For more than three decades, Jafa has developed films, objects, and happenings that refer to and challenge universal and specific articulations of being black.
In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, his work has become even more timely and relevant. The African-American artist and filmmaker portrays a world marked by conflicts around race and identity.
In this work Arthur Jafa shows us the unconditional bond that unites the mother to her child. Enigmatic and disturbing, "Sid/Melancholia/Mother" draws links between the engraving "Melencolia" by Albrecht Durer (1514), which depicts the winged female figure considered a personification of melancholy; the mother of Sex Pistols front man Sid Vicious, Anne Beverley, after her son's fatal overdose; and Haywood Patterson, one of nine Scottsboro Boys (African-American teenagers falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931), shown with his mother as he awaits trial.
Like many of Jafa’s works, his memorable self-portrait “Monster” also represents an examination of racism in the USA. Through the title, he marks the Black subject as primitive, fear-inducing, monstrous – a deep-seated stereotype that still influences people’s perceptions and actions to this day. One way of getting away from these stereotypes is empowering oneself by creating one’s own image. Jafa takes the way he wants to be seen into his own hands, literally. This is also reflected in his self-assured gaze straight into the camera.
Material SID / MELANCHOLIA / MOTHER, 2019: Fine art print
Material Monster, 1988 : Gelatin silver print
