Alfredo Jaar (Kara Zdanowski)

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect and filmmaker born in Santiago de Chile in 1956. He currently lives and works in New York. He is mostly known for his installations where he incorporates photography and socio-political issues and war. He makes art out of information most people would rather avoid: genocide, plight of refugees, ethnic and political violence. His work has been shown all around the world in contemporary art exhibitions in Venice, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Istanbul, Kwangju, Johannesburg, and Seville.

His best known work is the 6-year long Rwanda Project. In August 2004 he went to Rwanda and witnessed the aftermath of genocide. He returned with thousands of images and over the next five years he worked to evoke these images without ever showing them. In Real Pictures, Jaar buried sixty images from Rwanda in black linen boxes with descriptions of Caritas, a woman who survived the 1994 Rwanda massacres, on the lid in white lettering.



He has also conducted many public intervention works including The Skoghall Konsthall, one-day paper museum in Sweden, A Logo for America (1987), and The Cloud, a performance on the Mexico-USA border. In A Logo for America, Jaar was invited to produce a 45 second computer animation/intervention on the light board in Times Square. Here he demonstrated the significance of the images and language of geography. For a month this animation was featured every six minutes surrounded be the advertising in Times Square. In The Skoghall Konsthall, Jaar constructed a building with wood and paper, in a small town in Sweden characterized by its paper industry. 24 hours later the building was burned.In One Million Finnish Passports (1995), Jaar constructed a room-sized rectangle of Finnish passports to symbolize the restrictive nationalism of Finland

A Logo for America (1987)


One Million Finnish Passports (1995)


One Hundred Times Nguyen



I enjoyed reading and viewing many of Alfredo Jaar’s pieces because he uses images and texts of subjects’ people would rather avoid. One of my favorite pieces is Real Pictures, because the viewer is only given text and is left to contextualize what is inside the box. Unlike most war images Jaar makes the viewer think about political and historical context of the situation


He has created more than fifty Public Interventions around the world and in 1985 he became a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.


Works Cited:

A Logo for America: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-adpTvjNOk&feature=related

http://www.alfredojaar.net/