Alfredo Jaar
The artist Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile 1956, and lives in New York. Today he is one of the most successful artists in the international contemporary art scene. He often uses photography as elements in his works. In his installation he creates surroundings with the aid of architectonic details, photography, video, light and darkness. He has been active as an artist since the 1970s and has always endeavoured to unify ethics and aesthetics, as well as, motivated by a strong moral conviction, create works that through their beauty and intelligence stimulate other people's imagination, empathy and compassion. Some of the topics Alfredo Jaar has taken up in his works are commitment for the Third World, refugees, homeless and suppressed ethnic groups.
In 1994, Jaar traveled to Rwanda during the ongoing genocide. He was deeply moved by what he experienced and saw in the refugee camps. The international community's seeming lack of interest in one of the cruelest genocide’s of the 20th century, shocked him. When he returned home, he initially wanted to convey the pain and humiliation he had seen through the 3000 photographs he had taken during his visit to Rwanda. But he felt that the pictures had lost their meaning. So his works about Rwanda came to consist of just a few pictures combined with text. It is also an presentation about our insufficiency and inability to understand a catastrophe like that, and about the difficulty and impossibility of conveying information about it.