Arthur Jafa is a visual artist, filmmaker, cinematographer, and TNEG (motion picture studio) cofounder born in Tupelo, Mississippi and currently residing in Los Angeles. Renowned for his cinematography on Julie Dash’s pioneering film Daughters of the Dust (1991), Jafa, also the film’s coproducer, put into practice techniques he had long been theorizing. ‘Black Visual Intonation’ is but one of his radical notions about re-conceptualizing film. He is the director of Slowly This (1995), Tree (1999), and Deshotten 1.0 (2009). Jafa was the director of photography on Spike Lee's Crooklyn (1994), Isaac Julien's Darker Shade of Black (1994), A Litany for Survival (1995), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson's biographical film on the late Audre Lorde, John Akomfrah's Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), Manthia Diawara's Rouch in Reverse (2000), Nefertite Nguvu’s In the Morning (2014) and shot second unit on Ava DuVernay’sSelma (2014). Dreams are Colder Than Death, a documentary directed and shot by Jafa to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, garnered acclaim at the LA Film Festival, NY Film Festival and Black Star Film Festival where it won Best Documentary. His writing on black cultural politics has appeared in various publications such as Black Popular Culture and Everything But the Burden, among others.

Jafa’s notable solo, group, gallery and museum exhibitions include Artists Space, New York, NY (1999); Okwui Enwezor’s traveling exhibition Mirror’s EdgeBildMuseet—University of Umea in Sweden / Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada / Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy / Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (1999); 2000 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Black Box, CCAC Institute, Oakland, CA (2000); Media City Seoul, Korea (2000); Bitstreams, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2001); Social Formal, Westaelischer Kunstvein, Münster, Germany (2002); My Black Death, ARTPACE, San Antonio, (2002); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016); The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, NY (2016). Jafa will hold forthcoming solo exhibitions of his work at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; and The Serpentine Gallery, London, UK later in 2017; his work is on view at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tina Campt is Claire Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Barnard College. Campt joined the Barnard faculty in 2010, prior to which she held faculty positions at Duke University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Technical University of Berlin. Professor Campt’s published work explores gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany, and Europe more broadly. She is the author of two books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), an oral history that explores the experiences of Black Germans during the Third Reich, and Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), which theorizes the affects of family photography of in early twentieth century Black German and Black British communities. Campt has edited special issues of Feminist Review, Callaloo, and small axe, and together with Paul Gilroy, co-edited Der Black Atlantik (2004), the first German language collection of key texts on the Black Atlantic. Her third book, Listening to Images (forthcoming in 2017 from Duke University Press) theorizes the everyday practices of refusal and fugitivity enacted in a frequently overlooked genre of black vernacular photographs she calls “quiet photography.” Professor Campt is the recipient of research grants and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the American Association of University Women, The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Social Science Research Council, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

Love is the Message, The Plan is Death

Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt