Broken Fall (Organic) (2008)

Overview

Jemison adopts and refashions the premise of Bas Jan Ader’s work of the same name. As in the 1970s-era video, a young man clings to a tree branch for a long minute before ultimately falling out of the frame. Jemison’s remake honors the original’s investment in what she calls “the tension between labor, play, and the laws of physics,” but in her hands that material takes up “the complex demands of the performance of masculinity for Black men.”