Arthur Jafa (*1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) lives and works in Los Angeles. Jafa’s films have been presented at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals, and recent solo exhibitions of his artwork include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2024), LUMA Foundation, Arles (2023), Louisiana Museum, Humblebæk and Glenstone, Potomac, MD (both 2021), Fundação Serralves, Lisbon and Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (both 2020), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (both 2018), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (all 2024), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Baltimore Museum of Art and 14th Gwangju Biennale (all 2023), Musée national des beaux-arts, Québec, Aspen Art Museum and Bangkok Art Bienniale (all 2022), and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, New Museum, New York and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (all 2021). In 2019, he received the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale.
15 October 2025 • Mark Westall
We spoke with curators Jefferson & Susanna about the power of screen- based art, and how creativity continues to resist and reinvent in dark times.
3 October 2025 • Mark Westall
180 Studios presents Paradigm Shift, a major exhibition that will present some of the most acclaimed moving image works from the 1970s to the present
22 September 2025 • Mark Westall
His first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ
28 May 2025 • Mark Westall
For the first time, Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death will be shown alongside Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.
14 September 2024 • Mark Westall
This will be the LA-based artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, featuring recent wall works, sculptures and moving images
26 October 2022 • Irene Machetti
OGR Torino will be the first Italian institution to dedicate an exhibition to the US-born and based artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa.
25 June 2020 • Mark Westall
Fifteen arts institutions will simultaneously livestream Arthur Jafa’s video work, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) over the course of 48 hrs beginning tomorrow Friday June 26th for audiences around the world.
15 May 2020 • Mark Westall
Four international partners, the Serpentine Galleries in London, Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney and Google Arts & Culture team up to connect people across the globe via instructions for DIY artworks.
17 May 2019 • Lee Sharrock
There are some tough yet critical themes running through the 58th la Biennale di Venezia. The 2019 edition is curated by Ralph Rugoff and inspired by an ancient Chinese proverb which turned out to be a fallacy. Very appropriate for the unsettled times we are living through, where global economic disparity, alternative facts, migration and accelerated global warming are some of the most urgent topics concerning humanity and its future.
21 September 2017 • Mark Westall
Arthur Jafa to exhibit Love is the Message, the Message is Death in a site-specific installation co-presented by the Serpentine and The Vinyl Factory
17 July 2017 • Mark Westall
For the summer The Serpentine is showing the work of acclaimed US filmmaker, cinematographer and artist Arthur Jafa.
