Throughout his career, Jaar has addressed contentious themes. The Sound of Silence (1995) is a film installation based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a starving boy and a vulture taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter during the famine in Sudan in 1993. Alfredo Jaar’s installation consists of a space with a wall of fluorescent lights on the outside that blinds the viewer. Inside a film is shown describing Kevin Carter’s photograph and the critical reactions it caused, which culminated in Carter’s suicide. The photograph and its reception pointed to the role and responsibilities of a spectator when faced with human suffering. Jaar’s work masterfully probes central journalistic issues concerning the politics and ethics of images, information and narratives.
Searching for Africa in LIFE (1995) focuses on the absence of references to Africa in LIFE magazine. It is a collection of 2,128 chronologically sequenced covers of the magazine from the first issue in 1936 to the last in 1996. Jaar uses a similar strategy in the work titled From TIME to TIME (2006) which again brings to the surface the racism that governs the perception of the African continent in the Global North.
Jaar’s best known long-term work, the seminal Rwanda Project (1994–2000), is a response to the silence, indifference and inaction of the Global North to the events in Rwanda that claimed over one million lives. Through a variety of means, including survivors’ testimonies and pictures, the works reveal the world’s silence in the face of genocide, testing the visitor’s desensitization to images of violence and probing the limited capacity of art to represent tragedy.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the Hasselblad Award Laureate 2020, Alfredo Jaar:
Alfredo Jaar explores complex socio-political issues, bringing to the fore the ethics of representation. Through quiet and meditative works, Jaar confronts issues of great magnitude, bearing witness to humanitarian disasters and attesting to the impact of military conflict, political corruption and economic inequality throughout the world. His photographs, films, elaborate installations and community-based projects provocatively disturb common perceptions of reality. At the heart of his practice is what Jaar refers to as the politics of images, questioning the way we use and consume images, while pointing to the limitations of photography and the media to represent significant events.
Biography
Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956. He studied architecture and filmmaking, graduating from the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura in 1979, and Universidad de Chile, Santiago, in 1981. Jaar emigrated from Chile in 1982, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His exhibition at Fundación Telefónica in Chile, Santiago (2006), was his first in his native country in 25 years. Jaar lives and works in New York.
Text: Hasselblad foundation
