Los Angeles Book Launch and Conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Book Launch
Los Angeles Book Launch and Conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Saturday, November 2
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. PDT
Join Aperture and Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book launch and reading to celebrate the release of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s latest monograph, Dark Room A–Z (Aperture, 2024). Gökcan Demirkazik, art historian and contributor to Dark Room A–Z, will be in discussion with Sepuya about his newest publication.
In Dark Room A–Z, 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. This volume unpacks his Dark Room series (2016–21), 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. Dark Room A–Z serves as an iterative return and exhaustive manual to the strategies and generative ways of working that have informed Sepuya’s image-making over the past two decades.
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya (born in San Bernardino, California, 1982) is a Los Angeles–based artist. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, all in New York, as well as 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 Foam, Amsterdam, 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 ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, ArtReview, Di’van: 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.
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Image: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Studio (0X5A5038), 2020, 2017; from Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z (Aperture, 2024). © 2024 Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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