Jaar, Alfredo

Alfredo Jaar seizes the challenge of making art out of information most people would rather avoid: the plight of refugees, genocide, ethnic and political violence. Rather than offering information in an expected or familiar form, Jaar creates presentations that demand reflection. The installation Real Pictures, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1995, never reveals the image repeated in each of 99 portfolio boxes. These archival photo storage boxes are installed in rows and spot lit on the floor of the gallery, each box embossed with a text describing the image it contains: Caritas, a woman who survived the 1994 Rwandan massacres and subsequent retribution. In an age when images of atrocities have become commonplace, Jaar’s installation raises critical questions: does an over saturation of media images of war lead to apathy? Or is this, as Susan Sontag writes about in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), a much more complicated question concerning the limits of human sympathy and how war is waged—and understood—in our time. By providing the viewer with only a text to contextualize an unseen image, Jaar denies the viewer the visceral reaction most war images illicit and instead grants access to the subject through the chance to read and think about the political and historical context of the situation. This piece further raises questions regarding the veracity of both written and photographic description, not to mention the faith readers and viewers put in the writers and photographers who deliver them. Denied the opportunity to examine the image that Jaar describes in his text, the viewer is left to trust or question Jaar’s written interpretation of the scene.

Born in Chile in 1956, artist Alfredo Jaar went on to live in New York City. Among his site-specific, politically charged installations are Let There Be Light (1997); Real Pictures (1995), a memorial to the people of Rwanda commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago; Fading (1991), which examined the situation of Vietnamese refugees detained in Hong Kong; Geography = War (1990); and A Logo for America (1987), which appeared on the spectacolor sign in New York’s Times Square. Jaar’s work has been exhibited worldwide, in Kassel’s “Documenta” and the Venice Biennale, and numerous institutional venues, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.