Alfredo Jaar 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.

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.

Alfredo Jaar has made numerous public interventions, such as The Skoghall Konsthall (2000), a one-day art gallery made of paper in the small town of Skoghall, Sweden. The art gallery was set on fire as an attempt to visualize the absence of cultural institutions in the community. Other examples of public interventions are the electronic billboard A Logo for America (1987) and The Cloud (2000), a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border.

Alfredo Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2020) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017). The artist has realized more than 70 public interventions around the world. Over 60 monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018. His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong, and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.

Alfredo Jaar is represented by Galerie Lelong, New York; Lia Rumma, Milan and Naples; Kamel Mennour, Paris and London; Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London; Kenji Taki, Tokyo and Nagoya; SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo.

About the Hasselblad Foundation

The Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 under the terms of the last will and testament of Erna and Victor Hasselblad. The purpose of the Foundation is to promote scientific education and research in photography and the natural sciences. The Foundation’s annual international award for outstanding achievements in photography is considered one of the most prestigious photography awards worldwide.

The Foundation holds a photography collection focusing on Hasselblad Award Winners and Nordic photographers. The Hasselblad Center is the Foundation’s exhibition space, situated in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Further stipends for photographic advancement are awarded each year and the Foundation itself is engaged in the field of academic and artistic research through the publication of books, symposiums and collaborations with Swedish and international universities.