Reviewed by:

• AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa
• Gwyneth Shanks

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 [End Page 363] Bois, Freeman H. M. Murray, and L. N. Hershaw’s short-lived magazine The...

审核人：

• 亚瑟·贾法的AGHDRA
• 格温妮丝·香克斯

在八十五分钟的过程中，AGHDRA，亚瑟贾法最近的电影装置，展开。或者，更准确地说，它包含了抽象海景的翻腾运动，似乎拥抱或包围了观众。投影在一个几乎是墙壁大小的屏幕上，装置在十二个不同的锁框海洋场景之间切换。每一个的角度都略有不同，因此观众的感知从望着月光下平缓起伏的海浪转变为沉浸在波涛汹涌的大海中。水本身似乎由不同的碎片或大块组成。有时，它像黑曜石碎片一起移动，形成滚动的波浪；在其他地方，水就像被地震蹂躏的土地的破碎表面，沾满了厚厚的油。这幅动画海洋景观是深邃的缟玛瑙，在最深的黑色之间转换，靛蓝和明亮的蓝色，因为动画远处地平线上的太阳或月亮的光照亮了场景。Jafa 虽然不愿界定他的装置的含义，但将其描述为“[詹姆斯] 特瑞尔，当你被锁在船底时”，这是一个不可否认的描述AGHDRA对中间航道和黑色大西洋的召唤。

该作品于 2021 年在丹麦汉勒贝克的路易斯安那现代艺术博物馆首映，然后在 2021 年 11 月至 12 月期间在哈莱姆区现已解散的加文·布朗的企业进行了重新编辑和放映，该企业因大流行的大部分时间而关闭. 布朗本人在 2020 年夏天宣布在伦敦的 Gladstone 画廊担任新职位。Jafa 的作品是在 Gavin Brown 的 Enterprise 展出的最后一件艺术品，到 2021 年 12 月，它已被剥夺了其六年作为艺术家的所有迹象。蓝筹艺术画廊。当我在那里冒险时，我和我的同伴是唯一在场的两个人。一些贴在墙上的 6 个 8½ x 11 临时寻路标志将我们首先引导到空间的后面，然后到一个大型板条箱电梯，将我们送到二楼。安装了AGHDRA，大功率投影仪和许多大型扬声器悬挂在房间的飞行空间中，这主要表明了策展人对作品展示的支持程度。空荡荡的空间，和贾法完全实现和脉动的作品似乎相互挤压，争取作者对我的经历的主张。

AGHDRA的融合及其装置的特殊性说明了黑色的想象是如何在扩展的时空背景中出现的：中间通道的动画抽象，作品播放的海绵状放映室，近乎空旷的现在已不复存在的加文布朗的企业，以及一个高档化的哈林区。我认为这种对AGHDRA的扩展空间分析事实上，它是电影作品本身的组成部分。通过坚持它的地平线——不动，永远迫在眉睫，永远不会到达——它锚定了电影中每个动画帧的上三分之一，我们必须解决主观性如何通过空间和地理记录精确地获得感知意义，将装置艺术表达为一种实践总是嵌入在场地和身体、政治可能性和空间自主性之间的交叉相互作用中。

换句话说，地平线允许纠缠： 1) 殖民者将地平线想象为永恒的景象和征服；2) 最近关于城市中产阶级化的论述采用了征服叙事，将诸如新视野或定居前沿等行动框架化；3) 某些黑人女权主义思想流派利用天体物理学和事件视界的语言来应对完全不同的范式对黑人的时间和空间存在的深远影响。地平线——遵循 Susanna Ashton 对 WEB Du 的描述[End Page 363] Bois、Freeman HM Murray 和 LN Hershaw 的短命杂志The ...