Please join Arcana: Books on the Arts this Saturday, August 23rd, between 4:00 and 6:00 PM as we welcome Los Angeles’ own renowned Arthur Jafa to celebrate the release of his new publication Live Evil. In addition to signing copies, he will engage in a discussion of the book and his work with art historian Julian Myers.

“Having worked in film and music for decades, American artist Arthur Jafa 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.” Bringing together affective memories that touch on US history, violence, repression, modalities of survival and how these exist in the production and dissemination of images, music, sound and time-based media, Jafa reflects on the ontology of race and Blackness. This richly illustrated catalog reproduces key works from Jafa’s wide-ranging oeuvre and explores the philosophical, historical and artistic implications of his practice, featuring essays and a series of conversations between Jafa and key practitioners working in the fields of cinema, arts and theory.”

If you cannot attend and would like to purchase your very own signed copy of Live Evil, please place your order here!

Due to a limited supply of books being air freighted for the event, Arcana has had to cease taking pre-orders. If you would like them to let you know if they have signed copies left after the event, please email them. Books will be available at the event, one per person, first come – first served.

Thanks for your understanding!

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. Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts, and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of the artist’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in US culture? 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 Dust won him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. In 2019 he was awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.”

Julian Myers is an art historian, editor, and researcher based in Los Angeles. Their essays on contemporary art and exhibitions have appeared academic publications, exhibition catalogues, and more, and include essays on Edgar Arceneaux, Trisha Donnelly, Christina Fernandez, Nancy Holt, Arthur Jafa, Sterling Ruby, and Harald Szeemann. Myers was founding faculty in the department of Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, and was senior editor of The Exhibitionist, a journal of exhibition making, from 2014 to 2017. Since 2011, Myers has worked with Joanna Szupinska in the collaboration grupa o.k., which has produced projects and writing for art institutions worldwide.