Political Issues October 27, 2009

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations, often taking the form of an extended meditation or elegy.

I selected two of his works which relates to political issue and post them here. He aimed to attract global attention on the  genocides and famine issue of the third world countries through the photography and installation which has exhibited extensively internationally.

The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, 1996

The Eyes of Gutete Emerita is the signature work of a series entitled Rwandan Projects. It serves as witness to one woman’s suffering in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. When Jaar visited Rwanda in August after the genocide of April and May, he traveled to Kigali, where the violence was centered. On August 29 he went to the Ntarama Church, forty miles south of this city, where four hundred Tutsi men, women, and children had gathered to escape the killing and instead were brutally slaughtered on April 15. When Jaar and his interpreter were there, they met a woman named Gutete Emerita. She told them about seeing her husband and sons murdered during the massacre and escaping with her daughter. In creating Eyes, Jaar made the decision not to show the results of the carnage, the bodies that still lay rotting at the site; instead he describes it in text. Then he shows the eyes of the woman, whose expression he cannot forget. It is an attempt to fix and convey the horror of systematic violence by focusing on one survivor. He purposefully names the people in his work—they are not anonymous victims.

Another one :

The Sound of Silence, 2006, mixed media installation – wood structure, zinc, fluorescent tubes, LED lights, flash lights, tripods, 8′ video projection, looped, overall dimensions variable.

The Sound of Silence is one of six works which were shown in Jaar’s solo exhibition – Politics of the images, at South London Gallery, Season 4 in 2008. This work sets up the space of the image in a large cube. One of the external sides of the cubic structure is illuminated by a series of blinding white neon lights, violently contrasting with the dark interior of the cube. It takes eight minutes in this small camera obscura to understand and experience the multiple and interwoven tragedies of the Kevin Carter photograph. The story of Kevin Carter unfolds in writing and silence on the screen.The image won a Pulitzer Prize, but the South African photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide after being vilified by the public for not having intervened to save the child’s life. Jaar’s poetic but hard-hitting work highlights the problematic issues surrounding the image – from personal history to copyright law – to unearth some of the broader socio-political concerns related to the West’s responsibility to Africa and the developing world.

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