To coincide with the New Museum’s ongoing “Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony” — the first U.S. museum exhibition survey of the artist’s work — we’re proud to present his inimitable essay film Dreams Are Colder than Death. Commissioned as part of a two-night program ZDF organized to mark the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Jafa took the opportunity to make a film that grappled with blackness in the 21st century, electing to make a work that dealt with “the afterlife of the March on Washington” rather than the past.

Within its brief 52-minute runtime, Dreams Are Colder than Death presents an expansive view of the meaning and situation of blackness now. The film pairs archival photographs, views of the cosmos, and footage of black residents across the United States, alongside interviews with numerous black artists and intellectuals, including artist Kara Walker, filmmaker Charles Burnett, literary critic Hortense Spillers, poet Fred Moten, and former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver. This swirl of images and audio coalesces into a monumental meditation on blackness, as informative as it is eloquent and imaginative.

“In Dreams Are Colder than Death, it really started with people’s voices and people talking. And the images came afterwards…. I remember thinking, we’re onto something because we haven’t even started fucking with the images yet, and this shit completely held my attention. So then it freed the images up to have their own autonomous articulation, or to do that same thing autonomously.” ARTHUR JAFA

 

While Jafa has gained renown as one of the most important black image-makers in the United States (on top of his own artistic practice, he has also worked as a cinematographer for Spike Lee, Julie Dash and John Akomfrah), his approach to Dreams Are Colder than Death was premised on its soundtrack. He started the film working on the sound alone and upon reaching a 40-minute cut that flowed between multiple conversations featured in the final work, he decided to listen to the cut as an MP3 on his drive home — only after this first edit and requisite listening session did Jafa start coming up with the trove of archival, original and fantastical images featured in Dreams Are Colder than Death. It is a film that requires attentive ears as much as it does open eyes, both demands befitting an artist whose visual style has inspired countless artists and who once told Interview Magazine that he does not “work to music,” but rather, that he “listen[s] to music very intensely.”

Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1960. He studied architecture and film at Howard University, but soon became disenchanted with architecture as a career upon realizing that “Black people mostly don’t even own their own homes, much less are commissioning an architect to make something experimental.” In the ‘80s, he moved to Los Angeles and decided to focus on filmmaking. His first feature as a cinematographer was Daughters of the Dust, which won him the Best Cinematographer Award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. In the 2000s, he started showing his own videos and sculptures, growing his own reputation as an artist. His 7-minute video poem Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is now recognized as one of the most significant moving-image works of the 21st century; he also won the Golden Lion award for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale for The White Album. 

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Gladstone.