Jibade-Khalil Huffman: The Way You Make Me Feel

The Way You Make Me Feel features new and existing work from artist and writer Jibade-Khalil Huffman, including First Person Shooter, the video nominated by Ballroom Marfa for the 2018 season of Artists’ Film International (AFI). AFI is an international collaboration organized by Whitechapel Gallery, London, that showcases emerging artists working in video and animation. Huffman’s film will be complemented by newly-commissioned sculptural work, paintings, and video in Ballroom’s galleries.

First Person Shooter is a complex visual collage that layers stock digital animation, video shot by the artist, bold text, and multichannel audio. Overlaid onto the imagery, a libretto-like text inflects the video’s barrage of stimuli, applying lyricism to episodes that intentionally frustrate conventional narrative expectations. Stock audio and digital animation combine with Huffman’s footage of actors who can’t help but fall asleep mid-sentence. The artist calls into question the labor of consciousness and the anxious ennui of the internet age. The piece continues Huffman’s exploration into the formal qualities of video as a medium, while weaving together themes of anxiety, race, violence, overstimulation and boredom from a fractured palette of source material.

Each of the seventeen international venues that participate in AFI nominate an artist who lives and works in their country. The artist’s work is then exhibited at all the other participating venues around the world. As part of AFI, First Person Shooter will screen internationally and Ballroom will, in turn, exhibit videos from artists selected by these partner institutions in Marfa. The artists and partners for AFI 2018 include:

John Skoog: Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm
Vladimir Nikolić: The Cultural Centre of Belgrade
Robertas Narkus & Jokūbas Čižikas: The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius
Lê Xuân Tiền: DocLab, Hanoi
Juan Sorrentino: Fundacion PRÓA, Buenos Aires
Elena Mazzi: GAMeC, Bergamo
Danielle Dean: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Pelin Kirca: Istanbul Modern
Musa Paradisiaca: Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (MAAT), Lisbon
Mikołaj Sobczak: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
Rosa Barba: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin
Yim Sui Fong: Para Site, Hong Kong
Munem Wasif: Project 88, Mumbai
Ørjan Amundsen: Tromsø Kunstforenig, Tromsø
Patrick Hough: Whitechapel Gallery, London
Tom Ireland: The Whitworth, Manchester

Huffman has been commissioned to create two new artworks and two new installations for Ballroom’s presentation of AFI. In addition to embedding First Person Shooter into a new installation, Huffman will realize an original sculpture for Ballroom’s courtyard: a large-scale lightbox that employs the sun as a light source, illuminating an iconic film still and throwing the image over the viewer and the ground.  

The Way You Make Me Feel will include a new video/sound work that plays with the notion of foley. Foley is sound effects produced manually for films and added into the edit after recording. Huffman will also compose a text-based installation that experiments with the conventions of museum didactics and situates the other AFI videos within the logic of his visual, poetic and critical language.

Ballroom Marfa’s fall exhibition is organized by Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

For media inquiries, please contact press@ballroommarfa.org.

The Way You Make Me Feel is made possible by the generous support of Kenneth Bauso; The Brown Foundation Inc.; City of Marfa; Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles; Kristina & Jeff Fort; George S. Loening; Max Mara; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; the Ballroom Marfa Board of Trustees; the Ballroom Marfa International Surf Club; and Ballroom Marfa members.