Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar - Childhood in France, studies in Chile, debut in the USA

Alfredo Jaar, born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile, moved at the age of five to France where he lived for several years in Martinique. He returned to his homeland, however, in 1971 at the age of sixteen and two years later started an architecture course at the Universidad de Chile, adding film studies at the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura in his final year. He got a closer look at North American culture two years later when he moved to New York after graduating due to the growing difficulties
with the Pinochet regime raging in Chile. There his career as an artist took off, with installations as his choice of expression from the start, utilising the highly developed media of modernism to illustrate the horrors of the present. These cleverly thought-out early installations quickly attracted attention and brought him his first solo exhibition in 1985.

Exploitation, genocide: apolitical art is inconceivable

Alfredo Jaar saw himself through and through as a political artist. His projects are distinguished by their correspondingly uncomfortable and often unsettling themes: He travelled to Brazil, for example, to document the exhausting work in the gold mines of the Serra Pelada with his camera – the resulting images forming his contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1986, Gold in the Morning. The artist was often occupied with one particular theme for several years, such as the genocide in Rwanda, Africa, perpetrated by the Hutu against the Tutsi minority. Alfredo Jaar pursued the Rwanda Project for six years, spawning numerous installations in which the bloody deeds and their victims were brought to the attention of a shocked audience. In order to depict reality as unvarnished and expressively as possible, photography has become the most important and central medium in Alfredo Jaar’s art, without which his elaborate installations could not be realised. Fine art is the most important defender of democracy Alfredo Jaar took part in Documenta in Kassel twice and has been represented in the greatest galleries in the world. In Germany, he created a memorial against xenophobia in the 1990s, which could be seen at the Pergamon Altar. Jaar does not produce all the pictures in his installations: For his project Shadows, displayed in the Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin in 2017, he made impressive use of photographs taken by the Dutch photographer Koen Wessing in Nicaragua in 1978. They showed an aspect of the misery that the Somoza clan had brought upon the Central American state. Jaar does not exploit his demanding subjects, but rather moves aesthetically close to minimalism, avoiding pathos and sensation. He is interested in the defense of democracy with the means of art – an important concern which he represents sensitively and pointedly.