阿尔弗雷多·贾尔认领

Installation measuring 170 x 180 x 360 inches (431.8 x 457.2 x 914.4 cm), with software design by Ravi Rajan. Excerpt from Galerie Lelong's press release: "An enclosed aluminum structure that compels the viewer to enter, The Sound of Silence physically engages to boldly deliver its message. A light at the door signals when people are permitted to enter the space, alternating between red and green. Once inside the structure, an 8-minute film presents the viewer with a silent narrative that slowly unfolds a somber and devastating real-life story. With The Sound of Silence, Alfredo Jaar uses remarkable force, grace, and economy to highlight a complex set of ethical and personal questions about the act of looking and the responsibilities that follow."

"Serra Pelada is an opencast mine, a prodigious pit dug by human hands, the result of a massive influx of self-employed miners to a remote part of northeastern Brazil. (...) In 1985 Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar traveled to Serra Pelada, and over the course of weeks, he documented these miners and their backbreaking work in the mammoth crater. It was on these bare, muddy, terraced slopes that Jaar photographed and filmed what was to become Gold in the Morning, (...) Jaar’s first major solo show in South Africa. The series was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and subsequently at museums around the world, including the Whitechapel in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris." (Goodman Gallery Johannesburg)

Commissioned by the Public Art Fund as a part of the Messages to the Public program, A Logo for America was a 42-second animation which appeared on an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square over the course of two weeks. The work addresses the issue of the United States' ethnocentric tendency to appropriate the identity of the entire continent.

The installation is composed of a light table, magnifiers, 100,000 piled slides reproducing a photo of Gutete Emerita, a 30 years old member of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda whose family was killed with machetes in front of her very eyes (during the Ntamara Church massacre in 1994), and an illuminated wall text featuring the narration. "I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita." —Alfredo Jaar

"Commissioned for "Documenta 8", held in Kassel, Germany, in 1987, 1 + 1 +1 responds to the context of this major international exhibition, long dominated by a European perspective. (...) 1 + 1 + 1 equates the aestheticization of poverty with exploitation. The installation includes one of Jaar's first mature uses of the photographic light box - a glass and metal structure supporting a photographic transparency back-lit by fluorescent tubes - which has become his signature method of presentation. Here, three light boxes are mounted low on the wall; each contains a single black-and-white image of impoverished children standing in a dusty landscape. The photographs are cropped dramatically and presented upside down. (...) Three gilded "fine-art" frames - uniformly sized to fit the three light boxes - are positionend on the floor directly in front of the phtoographs. The left frame is empty, the center frame contains a series of four progressively smaller frames, and the right frame surrounds a mirror.1 + 1 + 1 challenges the conventional politics of museum or gallery display. (...) The three arrangements of the gilded frame - used here as the iconic representation of an aesthetic experience - offer the art audience three possible ways of looking at "reality". (...) 1 +1 + 1 suggests, in its inconclusiveness, Jaar's ambivalence about art's ability to directly effect the world's most pressing economic and social problems." (James E. Rondeau)

The Marx Lounge is an art exhibition by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. It was first presented at the Liverpool Biennial art exhibition in England in 2010 and was later shown at the Biennial again in 2016. The exhibit has subsequently been presented at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam's SMBA space and the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC). For the exhibition a large space was transformed into a red reading room with sofas, reading lamps and a large reading table on which a large collection of books was installed.The texts displayed included about 350 publications concerning topics such as marxism, capitalism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, politics, globalization and philosophy. Visitors were invited to sit and read the presented literature and the intent of the exhibition was to provide "a direct response to the financial crisis and to the fundamental questioning of the capitalist system it has elicited." Amongst the books were, apart from Marx’s work, books by Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek.Of the exhibition, Jaar has stated that "I wanted people to stop in their tracks, because you can access the internet in your home and on your phones. There is so much technology today, but I think the book has this value of stopping you in your tracks of asking you to go deeper inside. I have the impression that technology keeps us on the surface. (Wikipedia; photo credit: SomeDriftwood)