Alfredo Jaar: La Politique des Images

Spanning from the 1970s until today, this compelling new monograph traces the development of the respected Chilean-born, New York-based conceptualist--from his earliest public interventions to his latest installations. Some of the highly political subjects range from the plight of Amazonian gold miners to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and there are several previously unpublished works that the artist created in his hometown of Santiago during Pinochet's repressive military dictatorship, as well as numerous works made by collating and rethinking press clippings. Working with public interventions, installations, photography and video, Jaar examines the nature of images and their viewers' relationships to them. His work tackles 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. Texts by art historians Georges Didi Huberman, Griselda Pollock and Nicole Schweizer and philosopher Jacques Rancière.