Arthur Jafa: ‘I’m an agent of shadow activism’

This story is taken from the winter 2025 issue of Dazed. Order a copy of the magazine here.

Arthur Jafa often describes himself as an undertaker. It’s a fitting epithet for a visual artist and filmmaker who excavates the dark but necessary truths underpinning our present reality. To experience a work by Jafa is to plunge into the depths of society, to peer into its shadows; in his videos and films, he digs into our psyche, forcing us to confront what we’d prefer to keep buried. Through what he calls “affective Proximity” a term borrowed from fellow artist John Akomfrah – Jafa creates juxtapositions that unsettle and reconfigure our perceptions of reality. We look and are arrested, held in place by violence and grief, rage and terror. Sometimes there is beauty, but it is a beauty that is almost unbearable and always unrelenting. A beauty that takes your breath away and cuts to the heart, one that can only be known through grief. 

Take AGHDRA (2021), an 85-minute installation in which the sun sets over an undulating sea of magma-like material. This magma, which is generated using special effects, evokes an inescapable sense of dread as it shifts and crests. The body pulses with fear. Jafa described the film’s viewpoint as that of the hold on a slave ship; a horror we cannot escape, it is the beginning and the end, ground zero for Black life in America.

Writing about Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), released days after Trump’s first election, the late, great critic Greg Tate described that time, when conversations about race and systemic violence were erupting into national consciousness, as precarious, a “runaway story arc that may soon see the country careening towards either reactionary suicide or a radically deracialised redistribution of justice, wealth, empathy and democracy”. Jafa’s ongoing confrontation with the dark side of American life feels acutely urgent amid the resurgence of white supremacy and fascism in the country.

In September, Jafa published Live Evil, a catalogue expanding on his 2022 exhibition of the same name. Featuring a rich collection of images, essays and conversations with artists, writers and theorists including Saidiya Hartman, Peter Saville and Nathaniel Mackey, the book offers invaluable insight into Jafa’s singular practice. It reveals a mind that is at once encyclopaedic and kaleidoscopic, spiralling through the cosmos to traverse both heaven and hell. Here, alongside images from his archive, Jafa discusses his role as an undertaker, why he’s obsessed with “the shadow realm”, and his unrelenting belief in the power of collective consciousness as a form of alchemy that affects change.

“The idea of being an undertaker is about asserting a certain kind of freedom. All this shit is about freedom at the end of the day. Typically, we think about freedom in opposition to slavery. But just because you’re ‘emancipated’ doesn’t mean you’re free. It just means you’re emancipated from certain kinds of constraints, whether they be sociopolitical, cultural or spiritual. 

“The modality in which I imagine myself working is around how we manoeuvre ourselves into fuller beings. I’m trying to assert a space of effecting change that’s in the realm of magic, ritual or alchemy. I’m asserting my commitment to the idea that there are ways to effect change that, on the surface, don’t necessarily seem ‘real’ or material. My work has its most effective, emancipatory power when it’s operating in the shadow realm. I’m an agent of shadow activism.

“I’m not an activist. This notion of not being an activist is not a critique of activism, which is absolutely necessary. It’s just a counter-assertion that there is more than one way to achieve emancipatory change. The great Black political figures of the 20th century – Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hamer – were organisers. But they did more than organise – they created new visions of possibility that people could collectively mobilise around. The space in which they operated was something closer to the realm of the symbolic. You have to demonstrate to people that magic matters, and that magic can effect material change.

“I don’t think one person’s magic can do it, but collective magic can. Take Black Lives Matter. It was undeniably a moment of pushing for a transformation of how Black lives are understood. In some ways, it was a meme. A hashtag. That hashtag ended up functioning as a spell, a conjuring of sorts. The most powerful aspect of social media is when it ends up functioning, as it did with Black Lives Matter, as a stand-in for collective cognitive movement. Collective mind power.

“If you look at the regressive forces in the world, they’re trying to rewind reality. They’re trying to reverse-engineer where we’re at. People are banning books. Books have an immaterial dimension. They have a material dimension, but the ideas of a book are not the same thing as the material aspect of a book. A person can memorise a book. People did it for hundreds of years, memorised books and carried them around in their heads. The book is just a delivery system. It’s material, but the ideas it contains can provoke, trigger or unleash.

“I once interviewed Paul Coates, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ father, who runs Black Classic Press. He said one of the most amazing things anybody has ever said to me. He said that on the plantation, when the sun was setting and the work stopped, and enslaved Black people had to start doing what they had to do in order to make it through the next day, there was a liminal moment when they looked out from their enslavement. And he said, ‘What did they imagine?’ He said, ‘They imagined us.’ Even though sociopolitical and material freedom were not possible for them, they imagined us. We only exist because they imagined us.

“It demonstrates a quantum dimension to emancipation. There’s a certain dimension of our ability to imagine ourselves into emancipation that is magic. It’s quantum thinking. It’s our ability to affect the material realm in which we are operating by purely immaterial means. Whenever I assert the humanity,potential, power, beauty, glory and magnificence of Black people, I’m asserting the magnificence of human beings. We forget that sometimes.

“Everybody is born with this ability to imagine other possibilities. When you imagine a possibility and you share it with a person, that immaterial thing is more powerful. There’s a quantum feedback loop that happens in the same way the A-bomb happens. You force two particles together and create a chain reaction that is exponential. It’s the same thing with certain ideas. It’s a feedback loop. Call and response. It’s the same thing that Jimi Hendrix’s guitar does when it starts feeding back. It’s a cascade, but a cascade upward, not a cascade downward. Something was done or said that had generative – meaning emancipatory – capacity.

“It’s like solar power. There ain’t no end to the sun. When the sun ends, we end. An even more infinite source of power is the quan-tum –bthe mind, consciousness. That’s the most powerful realm to operate in, especially for people for whom material resources may be variable. But there ain’t nobody stopping the sun from rising.”

Live Evil is out now via Walther König and Luma Arles.