One of the most powerful works of video art will be available free online this weekend. Here’s why you must watch.

Most of it was pieced together in two hours. The music, a song by Kanye West, was added a few days later. Weeks of rearranging and tweaking followed. The result is perhaps the most powerful work of contemporary art of the past decade.

Arthur Jafa’s 7½-minute video, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” — a dazzling, deeply emotional montage of found footage showing aspects of the black experience, set to the sounds of West’s “Ultralight Beam” — was made in 2016. If it was timely then, it feels even more so now. And yet it hasn’t been easy for everyone to see.