Alfredo Jaar

In his artworks, Alfredo Jaar (*1956 in Santiago de Chile) often addresses political, social, or humanitarian topics. With his photo and light installations and with his performance art in public space, he questions not only the increasingly desensitizing effect of the flood of media images daily washing over the individual and society; he also questions his own position as a producer of images. “Images are not innocent,” says the artist himself. He thereby repeatedly employs the medium of light: light as the central element of photography; light as a philosophical category and poetic metaphor; light as illumination or a blinding phenomenon. But above all, he uses light as a void that omits the inconceivable and that casts the viewer back onto his imagination. Jaar rejects true-to-life likenesses and leaves it up to the viewer to form his own visual conception.

Jaar’s piece for the synagogue, “Lament of the Images” (2002/2019), consists of two light tables, one of which hangs upside-down over the other and rises and falls again at regular intervals. It thereby illuminates the room when it rises and plunges it into semi-darkness when it is lowered. In the context of a former synagogue, Jaar’s work can be associated not only with the loss of the symbolic effect of images – a lament found in many of the artist’s works – but also a plaint about the countless persecutions of the Jewish people.

Alfredo Jaar has been repeatedly invited to significant international exhibitions, including the documenta in Kassel, the Biennale in Venice, and the São Paulo Biennale. He has had solo exhibitions in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among other venues. He has taken part in important group exhibitions, including in the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Lenbachhaus, Munich. The artist, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, was awarded the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize in October 2018.

Synagogue Stommeln. A project of the city Pulheim.

Alfredo Jaar’s project was generously funded by the Kultur- und Umweltstiftung der Kreissparkasse Köln and by the Initiative für zeitgenössische Kunst und Musik in Pulheim.