The Way You Make Me Feel was an exhibition that featured 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 exchange organized by Whitechapel Gallery, London, that showcases emerging artists working in video and animation from across the globe. Huffman’s film was complemented by newly-commissioned sculptural work, paintings, and video from the artist in Ballroom’s galleries. 

First Person Shooter (2016) 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 applies lyricism to collaged 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. 

In addition to embedding First Person Shooter into an installation with multiple new video channels, Huffman realized a large-scale sculpture for Ballroom’s courtyard: a massive light box that uses the sun as light source, illuminating an iconic film still of Grace Jones. He produced a new video and sound work that experimented with the notion of foley (sound effects produced manually for film and added after recording), and also composed a vinyl text poems on the gallery walls, playing with the convention of museum didactics and situating the other AFI videos within the logic of his visual, poetic and critical language.

AFI 2018 was organized by former Ballroom Director & Curator Laura Copelin.