Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflects on the methodologies, strategies, and points of interest behind a single, expansive body of work at a pivotal moment in his career. Paul Mpagi Sepuyas photography is grounded in a collaborative, rhizomatic approach to studio practice and portraiture. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (201621), offering a deep dive into the thick network of references and the interconnected community of artists and subjects that Sepuya has interwoven throughout the images. The excavation and mapping of intellectual and artistic data points across the artists work is presented through three distinct voices, allowing for a comprehensive cross-referencing of conceptual categories. Each category is alphabetized and illuminated via new texts by curator and scholar Gökcan Demirkazik; selections from previously published texts about the work by critics, colleagues, and friends; quotations of other writers work that inspire the artist; as well as writings by the artist on his thematic preoccupations as they appear and reappear throughout this ongoing body of work. Dark Room AZ serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuyas image-making, after nearly two decades of practice.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (born in San Bernardino, California, 1982) is a Los Angelesbased artist. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other institutions. Notable recent exhibitions include a solo survey at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, a solo exhibition at Amsterdams Foam museum, the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art. Gökcan Demirkazik is an art historian, curator, and critic, and is currently a PhD student in art history at University of California, Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Artforum, ArtReview, Divan: A Journal of Accounts, Even, and Frieze. An alumnus of the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program, Beirut, Demirkazik holds a BA in art history from Harvard College.
