Alfredo Jaar
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Alfredo Jaar is a chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives in New York.
According to Art:21:
In installations, photographs, film, and community-based projects, Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations. Subjects addressed in his work include the holocaust in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States. Many of Jaar’s works are extended meditations or elegies, including “Muxima” (2006)—a video that portrays and contrasts the oil economy and extreme poverty of Angola—and “The Gramsci Trilogy” (2004-05)—a series of installations dedicated to the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
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Projects
The Rwanda Project
Alfredo Jaar's The Rwanda Project (1994-2000) is a series of photographic installations that document the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. During and in the aftermath of the genocide, Jaar visited Rwanda and took thousands of photographs though most remain unpublished. For those that have been exhibited, Jaar has developed novel approaches in an ongoing artistic effort to responsibly represent mass death. For an exhibition of 60 of the images, for instance, Jaar rendered the pictures invisible by placing them in sealed black boxes. For another exhibit, Jaar took a powerful image - a close-up of the eyes of a Rwandan woman who had witnessed a Hutu death squad massacre her husband and children - and reproduced it 1 million times. This figure represents the estimated number of people killed during the genocide.
According to open Democracy:
Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project: 1994–2000 is a series of photography-based installation works derived from his experiences in Rwanda. He first travelled there in the summer of 1994 while the genocide was still ongoing and overwhelmingly ignored by the international community. It is estimated that almost one million people were killed over a period of three months, from April–July 1994. The Rwanda Project attempts to counter and transform the conventions of photojournalism, which frequently objectifies violence through unmediated images of victimization. Alternatively, Jaar reverses the lens' eye to focus on the eyes of the witnesses and the hauntingly beautiful landscape in which this massacre was enacted as a means of eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.
See also:
- Alfredo Jaar: The Rwanda Project
- Amazon: Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994--1998 (Book)
- Art 21: “The Rwanda Project”
- artnet: alfredo jaar's rwanda project
- open Democracy: The Rwanda Project: 1994-2000
The Sound of Silence
Alfredo Jaar's The Sound of Silence (2006) is an enclosed 10-foot tall aluminum structure containing an 8-minute video projection featuring a story about Kevin Carter and his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a young Sudanese girl being stalked by a vulture.
According to Glasstire:
What remains unseen for almost all of the Sound of Silence is Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning image of a young victim of the 1990s Sudanese famine. Visitors to the exhibition first see a very large metal-clad box. At one end, a bank of 10-foot high industrial daylight fluorescents projects an austere verticality, emitting a rancid glow that illuminates the black-painted gallery walls. Entrance to Jaar's box is afforded on the opposite, darker side, where you receive your first instance of image control. Unlike most video artists, who assert no mandate for the dedicated attentions of their audiences, Jaar does not want viewers ambling in and out of his piece. The box uses light to assert when it is time to wait (a horizontal bank of red LED lights) and when to enter (horizontal red switches to vertical green). As viewers assemble outside, the social dynamic that sets in is both anticipatory and slightly nervous, with those waiting making small talk like airplane passengers waiting for their encounter with the metal detector.
See also:
- ArtCat: Galerie LeLong Alfredo Jaar, The Sound of Silence
- Houston Arts: A History of Violence: FotoFest tackles yet another theme, with mixed results
- YouReporter: The Sound of Silence (Video 02:09)
