SloPEX, 2022
Information about the artwork
- MaterialVideo (Farbe, Ton)
- Video length00:33:08
- Year of acquisition2023
- Inventory numberUAB 1326
- On viewCurrently not exhibited
- Copyright© Arthur Jafa, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery
More about the artwork
With "SloPEX," Arthur Jafa is referring to his 2013 video work "APEX." With extraordinary speed, the latter shows a sequence of images in black and white in which illustrations from art, biology, and history come together. The result is a chain of associations conveying a causality that is palpable and yet hardly tangible. For "SloPEX," Jafa slows down and expands this image stream of faces, icons, comics, film stills, and satellite shots, which is primarily perceived through the subconscious, from its original length of 8 minutes and stretches it to 33 minutes. The material comes from the artist’s own image archive, which he has been constantly expanding since his youth. Jafa grew up in the Mississippi Delta, which is particularly characterized by the racist social structures of the United States. From the successive images, which one continually tries to understand and contextualize, an intuitive narrative emerges about US history, Black self-concept, and the global significance of pop-cultural imagery.
Accompanied by beats of the Detroit music producer and techno pioneer Robert Hood, the haunting and cool sound fills the entire exhibition space. In combination with what is depicted, the sound unfolds an equally moving and unsettling effect.
Arthur Jafa: SloPEX
untilArthur Jafa combines themes such as Black identity, history, and visual culture into politically and aesthetically powerful artworks. In the filmic piece “SloPEX” (2022), Jafa shows a compositional sequence of images in black and white from over 100 years of media history with material from his own personal image archive. The video has been a part of the Brandhorst collection since 2023 and engages with the themes and works of the exhibition “This Is Me, This Is You: The Eva Felten Photography Collection.”
