Alfredo Jaar

In the impeccable space of Kamel Mennour Gallery, the Chilean artist, who had not shown in Paris for twenty years, presented a purposely limited number of works displayed in a non- chronological order. He offered a wide variety of interconnec- tions which included a view of the formal and thematic development he has perfected from 1979 to the present, and which generated a melancholy and reflective space. The exhibition featured two new works: Three women, an installation comprising six spotlights and tripods focusing the light on the faces of three extraordinary women, Graça Marchel (Mozambique), Ela Bhatt (India) and Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma), with whom he plans to develop a project momentarily hindered by the refusal of a Burmese visa; and Du voyage, des gens, the only video in the exhibit, which makes reference to police attacks against gypsies in France, and the expulsion of many of them. It shows an aged female gypsy fiddler playing an ancient instrument in the square in front of the Centre Pompidou. The simple and wordless image of this itinerant musician in the heart of Paris is highlighted through this nimbus of light — like the ones used to spotlight the portraits of the militant women.

This exhibition also provided the viewer a chance to revisit some of Jaar’s most emblematic works; obsessed with the way in which we see and think the image, the artist adapts forms (sculptures, installations, videos, photographs...) to a political and philosophical thinking that leads him to produce widely known works, like his works on Brazilian miners, or on the genocide in Rwanda, or the catastrophe in Bhopal. A specialist in installations which are eminently political, Jaar dedicates himself especially to the African continent, to which he is linked by a personal passion undoubtedly derived from his multiple trips. Examining the covers of American newspapers and magazines, he demonstrates that there are only three topics that fascinate journalists: animals, AIDS, and extreme poverty. Through media information, it is easy to misunderstand this continent and consider it a single entity with countless problems. This reductionist interpretation of the continent and the absence of intervention in its problems is at the center of Jaar’s works, which prudently examine the delicate lines between shock value and human value, between the visible and the implicit.

The shrewd selection inside the four walls of one of the galleries featured works that addressed African issues and revealed the artist’s constant interest in representing Africa in the media and the difficulties inherent in graphic journalism. Among these, the monumental 1996 work Searching for Africa in Life, organized in five vertical panels, assembled the 2158 covers of Life magazine from the first issue to the issue corresponding to the execution of the work. Composed by nine covers of TIME Magazine grouped in a single panel, From Time to Time (1996) showed wild African animals (lions, leopards...).

Simultaneously, Jaar showed in the Cour vitrée of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris his installation The Sound of Silence (2006). Although the text of the work was written in 1995, the artist could only create the installation ten years later. Using a nominal language, Alfredo Jaar briefly narrates the life of photographer Kevin Carter, his beginnings as a graphic journalist and his untimely suicide three months after one of his photographs earned him a Pulitzer Prize. The Sound of Silence has been presented around the world since 2006.

Jaar’s approach to his work through a genuinely political vision is based on the preservation of a general pattern of classical tragedy, in which the image alone suffices to denounce violence despite the absence of words. Jaar’s work has been characterized by its revelation of certain situations which would otherwise have continued to be concealed. Through a process of accumulation of texts and images, the artist seeks to question the viewer, but always leaving to him/her the responsibility for the interpretation. He proposes an encounter, the result of a collective and silent manifestation, of a kind of summit literally strewn with crosses.