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“These are films I love because they are preoccupied with the things that I find interesting—in cinema and in general. My taste has been informed by how much I like these films.”
—Arthur Jafa
Across his artistic practice, Arthur Jafa offers fresh combinations of images from contemporary art and culture in montage, collage, and other juxtapositions. A multidisciplinary maker whose oeuvre includes video, film, cinematography, sculpture, and artist’s books, Jafa’s preoccupation with the moving image is longstanding. Jafa began his career working on Black cinema classics, including serving as cinematographer on Daughters of the Dust and Crooklyn, and film techniques have been foundational for Jafa across years of art-making.
In conjunction with his exhibition Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid, Jafa has organized a Carte Blanche film program, a nonlinear survey of his cinematic influences and interests. Presented in pairs, the films’ unexpected juxtapositions of style and content allow audiences to see each work in surprising new ways. Film pairings include Oscar Micheaux’s Ten Minutes to Live with Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love, Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep with Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror.
Jafa’s connection of films in unanticipated duos resonates with his approach to his gallery exhibition, in which he has arranged nearly 100 objects from MoMA’s collection in dense clusters, with artworks from varied cultural and historical contexts displayed together side by side.