Alfredo Jaar

It is difficult

Curated by Gabi Scardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi

An architect by training, since become both artist and film maker, Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile in 1956, growing up during the military dictatorship of Pinochet, where he produced numerous works explicitly critical of the regime. In 1982 he moved to New York and for the next two decades participated in major international exhibitions.

Over the course of his career, Alfredo Jaar has tirelessly investigated the ways that art can interact with the broader social and political context, addressing issues of great topical relevance, largely focusing on events of humanitarian urgency, political oppression, social marginalization, and human and civil rights abuse. He concentrates particularly on situations that the public conscience tends to ignore, and on the rhetoric with which the media manipulates and filters informations. The artist gets directly involved with these causes, giving voices and faces to the victims and witnesses. Jaar believes in a correlation between ethics and esthetics. He attributes fundamental importance to the active and socially responsible role of culture and insists on the need to reiterate, through the creative energy of art, ethical positions that are not afraid to be openly critical in addressing such difficult arguments as injustice, genocide and humanitarian emergency. His works, invariably marked by an extreme formal perfection, incorporate different languages and media, from sculpture and installation to video, photography and light boxes. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, is a revisitation of his most significant and representative works of the past twenty years.