This project is part of a partnership between Étant donnés and the Ford Foundation to promote the African-American art scene in France. Étant donnés Contemporary Art is a program of the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE) Foundation, developed in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, with the support of Institut français-Paris, the French Ministry of Culture, the Ford Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the ADAGP.
Brief Emotion
The Frac Bretagne presents the first exhibition of the American artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman in France.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman (b. 1981, Detroit, MI) is an artist and writer who uses found, archival material, and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Often working site-specifically, his work takes the form of installation, video, projections, photographic light boxes, and photo collages printed on layered transparencies and paper. Foregrounding the materiality of digital media and its degradation over time, Huffman’s approach dissolves explicit meaning in order to reconstitute it as objects in perpetual flux. Through projection and repetition, his work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through the flattening of symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Huffman derives much of his practice from the intersection of writing, poetry, found media and common speech, often cutting, sampling and shifting bits of video and excerpts of text into new formats. The idea of erasure—of certain voices, people, and ideas—as subject matter and as technique is central to his practice, in building up and removing layers of material in his videos and two dimensional collages.
THE ARTIST
Jibade-Khalil Huffman (1981, USA), lives and works in North Carolina.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is graduated from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (BA, 2003), Brown University in Providence, RI (MFA, 2005) and the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA (MFA, 2013). His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA (2021) and Magenta Plains (2020) in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (2019) and the Ballroom Marfa Contemporary Art Center (2018).
Image : Jibade Khalil Huffman, Tempo, 2018, The Kitchen, New York, NY, Installation view © Jibade Khalil Huffman