Background
Alfredo Jaar was born on February 5, 1956, in Santiago de Chile, Chile. He grew up on Martinique Island from the ages of six to sixteen, at which point he returned to Santiago, Chile, with his family.
Alfredo Jaar was born on February 5, 1956, in Santiago de Chile, Chile. He grew up on Martinique Island from the ages of six to sixteen, at which point he returned to Santiago, Chile, with his family.
Jaar studied filmmaking at the Chilean-North America Institute of Culture, and architecture at the University of Chile until 1981.
Alfredo Jaar moved to New York City after his graduation in 1981, at the height of Pinochet’s military rule. Jaar’s experiences in different regions influence his art. Many of his projects question the relevance of geographical boundaries, whose primary purpose is to serve the interests of exploitative and oppressive forces. One of his first public pieces was "This is Not America (A Logo for America)", created in 1987. That contentious project, which overlooked a US Army recruitment station, established the future direction of his other works.
Jaar has become a respected installation artist whose photography, films, community projects, and artworks are featured in many museums, galleries, and public spaces worldwide. His work explores humanity’s outlook on images and art in general, and art’s limitations in representing significant events such as war, genocide, epidemics, and similar tragedies.
Political activism resonates in many of his exhibitions that seek to address major geopolitical themes. The themes he addresses include the Rwandan Genocide, gold mining in Brazil, environmental pollution in Nigeria, and immigration issues. His images and photos in "Geography=War", created in 1990, incorporate stark contrasts, forcing viewers to rethink their ideas about geography and power.
Jaar’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, including the biennials of Venice in 1986 and 2007, São Paulo in 1987 and 1980, Johannesburg in 1997, and Moscow in 2009. His artistic accolades include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1985, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1987, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000, and Spain’s Premio Extremadura a la Creación in 2006. Jaar has created over 60 public interventions globally, and over 50 monographic publications examine his works. The artist currently lives and works in New York.
Over his career, Jaar has explored significant political and social issues including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between developing and industrialized nations. In all his work, Jaar has focused on the imbalance of power between industrialized and developing nations and has used his hybrid of installation, photography, sculpture and public art in order to raise consciousness about these issues.
Quotations:
"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. [...] A process of identification is fundamental to create empathy, to create solidarity, to create intellectual involvement."
“I strongly believe that artists are thinkers, as opposed to object makers. My working process is 99% thinking and 1% making. That thinking process is at the core of what I do and this process is always triggered by a specific site or issue. In my career, I have been incapable of creating a single work of art out of nothing. That is why I am not a studio artist: I define myself as a project artist. I try to propose, with my projects, a creative model that responds to the particulars of a given situation. That model can then be projected into the world. I believe that this is what artists do: with each project we propose a new conception of the world; and that new conception is a new way of looking at the world. That is why I believe that we create models of thinking the world.”
Alfredo's son Nicolas Jaar is a musician and composer.
