Alfredo Jaar | IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU | 2023
In his media critique, Jaar continues to seek out what we might call slips of the eye – those moments when ideological univocality founders and we glimpse those unspoken truths, those unacknowledged histories that insist on reappearing – Tom McDonough, OSMOS Magazine
IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU is a potent survey of works by Alfredo Jaar which chronicles the artist’s forty-year critique of the Western media. The exhibition features important works which span the artist’s career, from the early 1980s through to new works created in 2022, which have not been exhibited before. It is the largest presentation of Jaar’s Press Works series to date.
In the early 1980s, when Jaar moved from the military dictatorship of Chile to Ronald Reagan’s United States, he felt at odds with the Western art world: “While I admired the American avant-garde and the conceptualists, when I looked around New York I didn’t see the world being reflected in the art that was being made. It was a world of fiction”. Engaging with the Western media was an equally alienating experience. Confronted with a heavily biased news agenda, Jaar become an avid observer of the media itself, paying close attention to areas of emphasis alongside areas of erasure. His routine of four decades involves reading daily international newspapers from around the world.
Artworks
Films
About
Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations. Throughout his career Jaar has used different mediums to create compelling work that examines the way we engage with, and represent humanitarian crises. He is known as one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today.
Through photography, film and installation he provokes the viewer to question our thought process around how we view the world around us. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between the first and third world.
Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).
Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005) and The Nederlands Fotomuseum (2019). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017).
The artist has realised more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018, and has recently received the prestigious Hasselblad award for 2020.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.
The artist lives and works in New York, USA.
Download full CV