The Message: New Media Works

The Message: New Media Works is a transformative journey through five contemporary film and video installations that use music, film and pop culture to reveal profound truths about life in the 21st century. It’s also first chance for D.C. audiences to discover leading international video artists Camille Henrot, C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, and Arthur Jafa, an award-winning cinematographer known for his collaborations Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Solange, and whose seminal Kanye West-backed “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” inspired the exhibition’s title. 

Each video appropriates a common method of communication in today’s media-saturated world—the sermon, the web lecture, the concert, the music video and the online sex chat room—and uses its familiar format to question and provoke ideas around information overload in the global digital age. Music and language appear as common threads to weave all five works together, as artists use them as tools to rewrite traditional narratives around theology, race and sexuality.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website