In Turin, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Arthur Jafa

From Nov. 4, 2022, to Jan. 15, 2023, the OGR Torino will host the first solo exhibition in Italy of U.S. artist Arthur Jafa (Tupelo, 1960), a Golden Lion winner at the 2019 Venice Biennale and who in 2020 made the whole world debate with his seminal work Love is the message, the message is death. The project, commissioned and produced by OGR Torino in collaboration with London’s Serpentine Galleries , curated by Claude Adjil and Judith Waldmann with Hans Ulrich Obrist, is the brainchild of Amira Gad and conceived by the artist for the spaces of Binario 1 as a single large installation. On view are some of the artist’s most recent works, never before exhibited in Italy.

Arthur Jafa, among the most significant international artists of his generation, has built over the course of his career a body of work that defies categorization in his exploration of Blackness: with his powerful and lyrical work, he destabilizingly combines images and stories from different contexts. A recurring question guides his artistic practice: how can media, objects, static and moving images convey the power, beauty and alienation specific to Black music in U.S. culture?

The opening and exhibition will be accompanied by a calendar of events to explore Arthur Jafa’s practice, with a focus on his relationship with music and the contamination between different disciplines and media.

Jafa’s films have been acclaimed at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals, and his work is included in celebrated collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the San Francisco Museum o f Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Stedelijk, the Luma Foundation, the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hirshhorn Mu seum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Jafa has recent and upcoming solo exhibitions to his credit at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark; and LUMA Arles, France.

Pictured: Arthur Jafa. Photo La Biennale Foundation

In Turin, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Arthur Jafa

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