Lecture date: 2010-02-12
Alfredo Jaar explores the problem of representing genocides, epidemics and famines in art and the desensitisation to images in public. Jaar is concerned with different strategies of communication in order to make images visible. For the installation of Let there be light: the Rwanda project 1994–1998 (1998), Jaar placed each photo in a black box with a description of what couldn’t be seen, ‘as if I were describing the picture to someone who was blind’.
Jaar has shown at many Biennales and at Documenta in 1987 and in 2002. Recent shows include Fundación Telefonica Chile, Santiago (2006), which was his first in his native country in 25 years and The Politics of the Image at South London Gallery in 2008. He has been a Guggenhein Fellow (1985) and a MacArthur Fellow (2000) and he won Spain’s Premio Extremadura la Creación.
