For Alfredo Jaar, veteran of three Venice Biennales and winner of the MacArthur and Guggenheim awards, art and politics are intrinsically linked, even if he eschews the label of ‘political artist’. Over the past 30+ years, his work has revolved around flagrant violations of human rights and our species’ propensity towards acts of gross inhumanity upon itself. Jaar’s critical gaze may have fallen on the killing fields of Rwanda and the Vietnamese detention centres of Hong Kong, but it is us in the West who undergo the severest scrutiny for our willful ignorance of global atrocity, and for becoming inured to resulting images of horror.
Just as poignant is a work such as his 1995 installation One Million Finnish Passports which stacked that number of blank passports behind a glass partition, reminding us of the uncertain futures of the people whose requests for Finnish citizenship were refused. “Everything we do contains a conception of the world”, Jaar said in an interview in 2017. “The artist creates models of thinking the world.” His talk will focus on recent projects around the world.
Friday 26 January 2018 (14:30-16:00) – Hilton Le Jardin
