Alfredo Jaar Is the 2020
Hasselblad Award Winner

Alfredo Jaar explores complex socio-political issues, bringing to the fore the ethics of representation

. Through quiet and meditative works, Jaar confronts issues of great magnitude, bearing witness to humanitarian disasters and attesting to the impact of military conflict, political corruption and economic inequality throughout the world. His photographs, films, elaborate installations and community-based projects provocatively disturb common perceptions of reality. At the heart of his practice is what Jaar refers to as the politics of images, questioning the way we use and consume images, while pointing to the limitations of photography and the media to represent significant events.

He joins a list of past winners that includes Cindy Sherman, Ansel Adams, Daido Moriyama, Walid Raad, Robert Frank, and Graciela Iturbide. “ I have focused the totality of my practice on the politics of images and this generous recognition gives me the support and strength to continue my journey in these dark times,” says Alfredo Jaar.

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 and his son is the talented musician we have featured several times Nicolas Jaar.

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.

His best known long-term work, the seminal Rwanda Project, 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.

The artist has also made numerous public interventions, such as The Skoghall Konsthall  a one-day art gallery made of paper in the 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 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 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.