Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American, Chilean |
| Known for | Conceptual art |
Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives in New York. He was born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and covering socio-political issues and war - the best known perhaps being the 6-year long The Rwanda Project about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He has also made numerous public intervention works, like The Skoghall Konsthall one-day paper museum in Sweden, an early electronic billboard intervention A Logo For America, and The Cloud, a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border.
The art of Alfredo Jaar is usually politically motivated, strategies of representation of real events, the faces of war or the globalized world, and sometimes with a certain level of viewer participation (in the case of many public interventions and performances.
"There's this huge gap between reality and its possible representations. And that gap is impossible to close. So as artists, we must try different strategies for representation. [...] [A] process of identification is fundamental to create empathy, to create solidarity, to create intellectual involvement."[1]
He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He was also a 2006 recipient of Spain's Premio Extremadura a la Creación.
His work has been shown extensively around the world, notably in the Biennials of Venice (1986, 2007), São Paolo (1987, 1989), Istanbul (1995), Kwangju (1995, 2000), Johannesburg (1997), and Seville (2006).
Important individual exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1992); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005); Fundación Telefónica, Santiago (2006); Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); and the South London Gallery in 2008.[2][3]
References
External links
- Alfredo Jaar's personal website
- 'Interview with Alfredo Jaar by Europa Magazine
- A Logo For America, early electronic billboard intervention, documentation on YouTube
- The Skoghall Konsthall documentation on YouTube
- The Silence of Nduwayezu, part of the Rwanda Project, documentation and artist statement