Jabu Arnell is a St. Maarten-born, Amsterdam-based artist. After studying International Relations in the US, he pursued an artistic education in the Netherlands at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. His work incorporates sculpture, video, sound, and light, often experimenting with found materials and interactive gatherings that unfold as an open research studio. In his practice, he questions themes such as movement, difference, and language performativity, while emphasises the interplay between body and mind using an approach he coined "conceptuitive," which embraces imperfection and impermanence.
In 2016, he was an artist-in-residence at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam. In 2018, he participated in the group exhibition Diasporic Self: Black Togetherness as Lingua Franca at Framer Framed, also in Amsterdam.
Jabu Arnell
Turn off the Lights: Disco Ball #13 A Kind of Black
Work in production
During the course of Arnell’s solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly (20 Sept. 2024 — 27 Apr. 2025), the sculpture will evolve, incorporating built, ready-made, and found materials.
With Disco Ball #13, the artist explores disco as a cultural and historical pillar for queer communities and as a key element in his own artistic practice. In the late 1970s, disco music and culture—a celebration of queer, Black, and Hispanic/Latinx joy—were seen as a threat to the status quo and were met with a mix of fear, excitement, violence, and celebration. For instance, in 1979, a promotional event was organized at Comiskey Park to boost ticket sales. Baseball fans were offered discounted entry to the stadium if they brought a disco record with them to the game. At the end of the evening, a massive crate of disco records was destroyed in a theatrical explosion, to the cheers of over 45,000 people in the stadium.
For Arnell, the Disco Ball serves as a gateway to exploring various phenomena, including vulnerability, beauty, cringe, and glamour, while also challenging the conventional meanings and associations of these concepts.
The work is part of the solo show Jabu Arnell: Turn off the Lights: Disco Ball #13 A Kind of Black at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (20 Sep. 2024 — 27 Apr. 2025)
Turn off the Lights: Disco Ball #13 A Kind of Black was selected by the Commissioning Committee of Hartwig Art Foundation and acquired through the Hartwig Art Production | Collection Fund. It will subsequently be donated to the Dutch state, becoming an integral part of the national art collection (‘Rijkscollectie’), available for institutions in the Netherlands and abroad.