Pictured:

Walker

Art

Center

Executive

Director

Mary

Ceruti’s

Art

Basel

picks

Alfredo Jaar’s early projection piece The Power of Words (1984) laments the way in which words fail us in the face of human suffering, while also examining the shifting structure of the mass media. Made at a moment when images were starting to become our primary source of storytelling and information, Jaar projects a series of press images onto a photograph of a manual typewriter (the traditional tool of the journalists’ trade), backlit by a red neon light. They show individuals in a state of trauma taken in sites of conflict around the world. It has all the elements of Jaar’s best work: insisting we witness the harms we can do to each other while also acknowledging the structures that can engender and perpetuate those very harms.