Alfredo Jaar. La politique des images
The museum presented a major retrospective of the work of Alfredo Jaar (*1956, Santiago, Chile, lives and works in New York), featuring previously unseen pieces as well as works being shown in Europe for the first time.
The exhibition, produced in close collaboration with the artist, offers a vast overview of his work, from documentations of his first public interventions undertaken in Chile (Studies on Happiness, 1979–1981) to his latest installation to date, The Sound of Silence (2006), by way of his works on gold miners in Amazonia (Introduction to a Distant World, 1985; Out of Balance, 1989), works produced following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Real Pictures, 1995; Field, Road and Cloud, 1997) as well as his last film Muxima (2005), a wonderful piece about Angola. Making use of media as diverse as public interventions, installations, photography and video, Alfredo Jaar’s work questions the nature of images and our relationship to them. The crucial questions that he explores in his work concern the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility. For more than thirty years, he has thus created an extremely powerful body of works of utmost sensitivity, closely linked to current events while taking the opposite stance to sensationalistic reports; on the contrary, he offers a “stand-still”, opening up the possibility of registering the density of political aspects in what appeared to be merely an incident or occurrence.
If the artist’s reputation no longer needs to be made on the contemporary art circuit – he has participated in the Venice (1986 and 2007), São Paulo (1987), Sydney (1990), Kwangju (1995), Istanbul (1995), Johannesburg (1997) and Seville (2006) Biennials, as well as at Documenta in Kassel (1987 and 2002), and has had major exhibitions in New York, London, Berlin, Madrid and Santiago – he has never so far enjoyed a solo exhibition in Switzerland or France. The Musée cantonal in Lausanne is consequently delighted to be filling an important gap.
Biographical information
Born in Santiago, Chile, the artist studied architecture and cinema before leaving the country in 1981 for New York. Since then he has divided his work into three fields of activity: public interventions (more than fifty to date), works intended for museum presentation and, finally, teaching.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, was appointed MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and received the Extremadura a la Creación prize in 2006.
www.alfredojaar.net
