In the studio with Arthur Jafa | "The place where images overlap is yo.

Arthur Jafa. Still from APEX. 2013. Video (color, sound),

Musician: Robert Hood. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2019 Arthur Jafa

For decades, Arthur Jafa clipped photographs from magazines, newspapers, and advertisements and organized them in notebooks, some of which served as references for his filmmaking and cinematography work. In recent years, he has migrated this practice over to his computer. APEX is a file of digital images that he has presented in different forms, including as a grid on a panel and as a fast-paced video.

At roughly eight minutes, the video packs in images that flash by to an electronic beat intercut with an arrhythmically pulsing beep. Pulled from a broad range of popular sources, among them sci-fi and horror films, these uncountable images include: Mickey Mouse; Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth; electron microscope images of insects; black athletes, musicians, and artists; shots of an eclipse; skulls and mutilated bodies. Seen one after the next in this way, radical pairings and contrasts emerge, in which heroes and villains, past and present become enmeshed in what Jafa has termed “spooky entanglements.”