For his first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Arthur Jafa will present GLAS NEGUS SUPREME, bringing his complex edit to the Kingly Street gallery.
Working as a filmmaker and artist for over four decades, Jafa’s extended practice is widely considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art, independent film and cultural theory today. Witnessing, celebrating and cataloguing the deep soul of Black life through images, Jafa has forged a groundbreaking trail in the rich terrain of Black representation. This exhibition will premiere two significant new moving image works alongside several paintings, silkscreen works and cutouts.
If Jafa’s repository of images is a dense and shifting mass, each cinematic work exists as a wave – a swell of sound and feeling that unmoors the viewer into a sea of unfixed relationality and aesthetic liquidity. Operating at the highest frequency of visual and sonic expression, the kinetically charged films amplify the incalculable expanse of life in America, Africa and beyond. Jafa’s films are often individual clips sutured together, subtly or surprisingly doctored. Sourcing found and personal footage since the 1980s, Jafa intertwines his substantial catalogue with a corresponding sampled score. Each conjunction strikes a chord; collision and affect coexist in an ongoing, visceral exchange. Emerging from this flow of careful curation and choreographed editing is Jafa’s concept of ‘Black Visual Intonation’: when the wave of images and footage are in synchrony with the entropic, haunting tonalities of the work. Music is essential to this endeavour. Musical icons appear as magnificent spectres – ghostly entities of cultural life that move momentarily into the present, their being kept as an elusive and recalcitrant tremor.
If Jafa’s film works are characterised by their adherence to – or departure from – a liquid flow, then his sculptural and image-based works are prominent outcrops within this, enacting historical interruptions through abstracted and recombined images. Working with paint for the first time, Jafa addresses the hierarchy of this medium, depicting Kurt Cobain’s body looming from an obscure black space, while nearby, hip-hop artist Foxy Brown is illuminated, holding court over her audience. Jafa indexes the pain accompanying their fame, embedding it within harvested and layered art historical references. Each work reverberates a particular time and place across blurred temporalities, surfacing as a form of mythic heroism. Formulating a fluid visual architecture and a ‘prismatic truth’ of Blackness, Jafa has carved a new vernacular for the 21st century.*
*Arthur Jafa in conversation with Helen Molesworth, Love is The Message, The Message is Death, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016
Arthur Jafa, GLAS NEGUS SUPREME, 10th October – 29th November 2025 Sadie Coles HQ Kingly Street
Art Opening Friday 10th October, 6PM-8PM
About the artist
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo) lives and works in Los Angeles and graduated from Howard University, Washington DC, in 1983. He has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions including HARDCORE / LOVE, Conditions, London (2025); Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, E-Werk, Luckenwalde (2025); Works from the MCA Collection, MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2024); Unrest, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, University of Melbourne (2023); RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON, OGR Torino (2022); The White Album, 5 West 127th Street, New York (2022); Live Evil, LUMA Foundation, Arles (2022); Love Is The Message, the Message Is Death, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria (2022); Glenstone Museum, Maryland (2021); MAGNUMB, The Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (2021); Dinosaur Fried Chicken Man, Cahiers d’Art, Paris (2021); A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, Fundação de Serralves, Porto (2020); Love is the Message,The Message is Death, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2020); Love is the Message, The Message is Death, Palazzo Madama, Turin (2019); A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); and A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Body and Soul, Bourse de Commence: Pinault Collection, Paris (2025); Days of Re-Entry, CAC Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2024); The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Cincinnati Art Museum (2024); Summer Show, curated by Philippe Parreno, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (2024); If not now, when?, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2024); Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2024); Improbable Anagrams: Works from the Serralves Collection, Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto (2024); The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024); and Cinema Galleggiante (Floating Cinema) festival, Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venice (2024). Jafa’s films have been recognised with numerous awards including the Golden Lion Award, 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and Best Documentary, Black Star Film Festival (2015). His work is held in various prestigious public collections internationally including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Tate, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Brandhorst Museum, Munich.
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