The Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is hosting a major retrospective of the work of Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist based in New York City and featured in the upcoming fourth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images, curated by Nicole Schweizer and produced in close collaboration with the artist, offers a vast overview of his work, including previously unseen pieces and others that are being shown in Europe for the first time. The artwork on display goes from documentations of his first public interventions in Chile (Studies on Happiness, 1979-1981) to his latest installation to date, The Sound of Silence (2006). Other pieces included in the show are his works on gold miners in Amazonia (Introduction to a Distant World, 1985; Out of Balance, 1989), works related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Real Pictures, 1995; Field, Road, and Cloud, 1997) as well as his latest film, Muxima (2005).
For more than thirty years, Alfredo Jaar, making use of multiple media as public interventions, installations, photography and video, has created an extremely powerful body of works that questions the nature of images and our relationship to them. The crucial questions that he explores in his work concern the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images runs through September 23, 2007.
[via e-flux]
