Alfredo Jaar

Artist Alfredo Jaar (Chile, 1956) lives

and works in New York. His often politically

charged works have been exhibited

all over the world: at the Venice, Sao Paulo

and Seville Biennales, for instance. Some

of his works are included in the collections

of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture

Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum

of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In

2006 Jaar was awarded the Spanish Premio

Extremadura a la Creación. One of his best

know installations is Fading (1991), which

examined the situation of Vietnamese refugees

detained in Hong Kong.

Real Pictures (1995) deals with Rwanda and

the consequences of the state-led genocide

of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus in 1994 after

the shooting down of the president’s aeroplane.

The photos selected for Real Pictures

show various aspects of the genocide: mass

slaughter, refugee camps, ravaged cities

and pain. Each photo is ‘entombed’ in a

black linen box and each box bears a factual

description of the photograph it contains.

The boxes are piled together in soberly

monumental ‘mass graves’. Because the

viewer is confronted by violent images so

often in everyday life, a direct presentation

of the photos would lessen their effect – we

would not really see them. By burying the

images, Jaar transforms them into a document

that brings out the narrative and

makes the viewer really see the horror.