Arthur Jafa

52 Walker is pleased to present its eleventh exhibition, which features new work by Los Angeles–based artist Arthur Jafa (b. 1960). Lauded for his achievements as a filmmaker and cinematographer as well as a visual artist, Jafa has developed an incisive, chameleonic practice, through which he seeks to unravel the cultural significance and strictures ascribed in tandem upon Black existence in the Western world. Spanning the length of the gallery is a site-specific installation—a plexiglass structure that Jafa refers to as a “picture unit”—whose interior is covered from floor to ceiling in the artist’s characteristically potent imagery, drawing the viewer through its labyrinthine halls. Jafa has also created new paintings, sculptures, and a new film, all of which are installed around the gallery, their forms and colors reflected onto the picture unit’s exterior in a charged and destabilizing kind of visual doubling. In Black Power Tool and Die Trynig, Jafa invokes the body’s personal, political, and industrial guises in one fell swoop, deftly interweaving images and objects to create a forceful and maximal space that beckons toward engulfment and revelation alike.