Alfredo Jaar


Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, photographer and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and covering socio-political issues and war—the best known perhaps being the 6-year-long The Rwanda Project about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He has also made numerous public intervention works, like The Skoghall Konsthall one-day paper museum in Sweden, an early electronic billboard intervention A Logo For America, and The Cloud, a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border. He has been featured on Art:21. He won the Hasselblad Award for 2020.
He is the father of musician and composer Nicolas Jaar.

Early life

Jaar was born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile. From age 5 to 16, he lived in Martinique before moving back to Chile. In 1982, he moved permanently to New York City.

Work

Jaar art is usually politically motivated, with strategies of representation of real events, the faces of war or the globalized world, and sometimes with a certain level of viewer participation.
"There's this huge gap between reality and its possible representations. And that gap is impossible to close. So as artists, we must try different strategies for representation. process of identification is fundamental to create empathy, to create solidarity, to create intellectual involvement."

Exhibitions

His work has been shown extensively around the world, notably in the of Venice, São Paulo, Istanbul, Kwangju, Johannesburg, and Seville. His work, Park of the Laments was part of the which opened in 2010 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. For the "Revolution vs Revolution" exhibition held at the Beirut Art Center, he produced a new version of his photographic project 1968.
Important individual exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York ; Whitechapel Gallery, London ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago ; Moderna Museet, Stockholm ; Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome ; Fundación Telefónica, Santiago ; Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne ; the South London Gallery in 2008.; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield UK.
Jaar represented Chile at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Awards

Jaar has been the recipient of many Honorary Doctorates, including the University of Wolverhampton, UK, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, USA, The New School, New York, USA, SUNY, State University of New York, USA, IDSVA, Institute for Doctorial Studies in the Visual Arts, New York, USA, Accademia di Belle Arti, Macerata, Italy, and Universidad de Talca, Chile.
Alfredo's son Nicolas Jaar is a musician and composer.

General references