AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa (review)

Over the course of eighty-five minutes, AGHDRA, Arthur Jafa’s most recent film installation, unfolds. Or perhaps, more precisely, it enfolds, the churning movements of an abstracted seascape seeming to embrace or envelop a viewer. Projected on an almost wall-sized screen, the installation shifts between twelve distinct locked-frame ocean scenes. Across each, the angle is slightly different, such that a viewer’s perception transitions from looking out across a moonlit expanse of gently undulating waves to being immersed within the relentless pounding of a rough sea. The water itself appears composed of distinct shards or chunks. At times, it resembles obsidian fragments moving in concert to form rolling waves; at other points, the water is like the fractured surface of an earthquake-ravaged land, smeared with thick oil. This animated oceanscape is a deep onyx, shifting between deepest blacks, indigos, and bright blues, as the light of the sun or moon on the animation’s far horizon illuminates the scene. Jafa, while reticent to delimit the meaning of his installation, has described it as a “[James] Turrell while you’re chained in the bottom of a boat,” a descriptor that makes undeniable AGHDRA’s evocation of the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic.

The work premiered at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, in 2021, and then was reedited and screened at the now-defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, which had been closed for much of the pandemic, between November and December of 2021. Brown himself took a new position with Gladstone Gallery in London, a move announced in summer 2020. Jafa’s piece was the final artwork presented at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which by December 2021 had been stripped of all indications of its six-year stint as a blue-chip art gallery. When I ventured there, my companion and I were the only two people present. Some half-dozen 8½ x 11 ad hoc wayfinding signs taped to the walls directed us first to the back of the space and then to a large crate elevator that deposited us on the second floor. A cluster of metal folding chairs was arranged at the far edges of the cavernous room in which AGHDRA was installed, the high-powered projector and many massive speakers hung in the room’s fly space the primary indication of just how much curatorial support went into the work’s presentation. The empty, vacated space, and Jafa’s fully realized and pulsating piece seemed to press up against each other, grappling for authorial claim over my experience.

The confluence of AGHDRA and the particularities of its installation speaks to how imaginings of blackness emerge in and through an extended spatial and temporal context: an animated abstraction of the Middle Passage, the cavernous screening room in which the work played, the near-empty and now defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and a gentrifying Harlem. I argue that this extended spatial analysis of AGHDRA is, in fact, constitutive of the filmic work itself. By staying with its horizon line—unmoving and perpetually imminent, never arriving—that anchors the upper third of each animated frame in the film, we must contend with how subjectivity accrues perceptual significance precisely through spatial and geographic registers, articulating installation art as a practice always already embedded within an intersectional interplay between site and body, political possibility and spatial autonomy.

The horizon, in other words, allows for an entangling of: 1) a colonial imagining of the horizon as a perpetual sight of and for conquest; 2) recent discourses of urban gentrification that take up conquest narratives, framing such actions as new horizons or frontiers for settlement; and 3) certain strains of Black feminist thought that draw upon the language of astrophysics and the event horizon to grapple with the profound implications of a wholly different paradigm for blackness’s temporal and spatial existence. The horizon—to follow Susanna Ashton’s description of W. E. B. Du Bois, Freeman H. M. Murray, and L. N. Hershaw’s short-lived magazine The...