Kahlil Joseph is one of the most prominent music video directors of his generation, having worked with Beyoncé, Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar and others. Joseph introduces new ways of representing blacks which investigate the relationship between installation, music video and short film, as seen in two American productions presented here, one of them with a Brazilian collaboration.
Until the quiet comes (2012), for a song by Flying Lotus (the stage name of Steve Ellison), presents a kind of emblem for the extermination of blacks in the USA. Filmed at Nickerson Gardens, a housing project in the Watts neighborhood of LA, its first scene shows a boy standing on an empty pool on a sunny day. With a defiant gaze, he raises his arm and, after forming a pistol with his hand, shoots. The gesture is only a mimic, but a stray bullet does hit him, staining the pool with his dark blood. Another scene shows a man mortally wounded on the ground who seems to revive and dance away to a car, which leaves the scene driven by Flying Lotus himself.
The Model: chapter 2 - Oshun and the Dream (2010) was produced in collaboration with Brazilian musician Seu Jorge. Marcelo is a sleepwalker played by Seu Jorge who dreams about the Oshum orisha (Oxum in the Brazilian tradition), a female deity who rules over fresh waters and symbolizes beauty, fertility and vanity, and is worshiped by Afro-Brazilian religions. Orishas frequently appear in dreams, an aspect that inspires the dreamlike structure of Joseph’s short.
In the 1960s, museums and galleries started becoming more open about video media, and in the 1990s music videos began joining contemporary art showings. The internet’s popularization and the rise of new musical and audiovisual consumption platforms in the 2000s triggered radical changes in the audience’s behavior. Museums also are starting to feel the effects of such changes and paying attention to their digital platforms and to a growing audience of hyperconnected visitors who increasingly demand interactive and multisensory experiences. At museums, music videos usually watched on small computer or smartphone screens are exhibited on a larger scale and more immersive contexts, allowing for a more focused viewing. In this sense, filmmakers like Joseph, who create movies where blacks are not just supporting actors but authors and agents of their experiences, introduce a more refined, complex and poetic discourse that reinforces the political potential of images.
CURATED BY Horrana de Kássia Santoz, Assistant Curator of Mediation and Public Programs, MASP.
Throughout 2018, the videos presented here are part of masp’s cycle of Afro-atlantic Histories. coming from different nationalities, generations and origins, the artists included in this program are the following: Ayrson Heráclito, John Akomfrah, Kahlil Joseph, Kader Attia, Catarina Simão, Jenn Nkiru and Akosua Adoma Owusu.
