The Sound of Silence

Reference monograph, with an essay by Okwui Enwezor, images of the most recent exhibitions and public interventions, as well as a selection of the artist’s emblematic installations and press works since the mid-1980s. Born in 1956 in Santiago, Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect and filmmaker living in New York. Working with such different media as public interventions, installations, photography, and video, he examines the nature of images and the viewers’ relationship to them. The crucial questions that he keeps exploring in his work tackle the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility. For close to 30 years he built up a body of work of enormous strength and sensitivity, closely linked to current events, but taking the opposite stance to sensationalist reports.