“The content of my videotape involves documentary subject matter. The visuals combined with music are the attempt to create the mood of the community…in certain sequences light reflections create forms in space.”
—Ulysses Jenkins, “Comment on Video Tape” (1977)
“This is called Black Montage. This is a conglomeration of some of the great Black heroes in American history.”
—Ulysses Jenkins, Remnants of the Watts Festival (1980)
Greater than the sum of its individual elements, interests, or artistic approaches, there is a cumulative electricity that runs through the work of American artist Ulysses Jenkins. His is a practice that invites audiences in while at the same time reaching ever outward. That the retrospective exhibition Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation at Berlin’s Julia Stoschek Foundation is able to channel and replicate such gestures elevates it to a rare, thrilling experience. Following two revelatory presentations at Philadelphia’s ICA and Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum in 2021 and 2022, respectively, the international debut presentation of the exhibition further solidifies Jenkins’ belatedly vaunted status in the realms of video and performance art, both within and beyond the context of his West Coast ecosystem.
Similarly, while the work itself remains rooted in and responsive to Jenkins’ North American context, the Stoschek presentation serves to amplify the transnational is the rare moving image–oriented exhibition that serves to invigorate rather than drain the more time one spends with it.
