Alfredo Jaar
03 Oct 2008 - 25 Jan 2009
© Alfredo Jaar
Emergencia, 1998
photo: Agostino Osio
courtesy MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leòn, Leòn, Spain
Emergencia, 1998
photo: Agostino Osio
courtesy MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leòn, Leòn, Spain
ALFREDO JAAR
"It is difficult"
From 3/10/2008 to 25/1/2009
General information:
Hangar Bicocca, tel. +39 02 853531764; www.hangarbicocca.it
Spazio Oberdan, tel. +39 02 77406300/6302; www.provincia.milano.it/cultura
Retrospective exhibition and public project
promoted by Provincia di Milano and by Hangar Bicocca
curated by Gabi Scardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
opening: October 2, 2008 from 6 pm
An architect by training, since become both artist and film maker, Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile in 1956, growing up during the military dictatorship of Pinochet, where he produced numerous works explicitly critical of the regime. In 1982 he moved to New York and for the next two decades participated in major international exhibitions.
Over the course of his career, Alfredo Jaar has tirelessly investigated the ways that art can interact with the broader social and political context, addressing issues of great topical relevance, largely focusing on events of humanitarian urgency, political oppression, social marginalization, and human and civil rights abuse. He concentrates particularly on situations that the public conscience tends to ignore, and on the rhetoric with which the media manipulates and filters informations. The artist gets directly involved with these causes, giving voices and faces to the victims and witnesses.
Jaar believes in a correlation between ethics and esthetics. He attributes fundamental importance to the active and socially responsible role of culture and insists on the need to reiterate, through the creative energy of art, ethical positions that are not afraid to be openly critical in addressing such difficult arguments as injustice, genocide and humanitarian emergency.
His works, invariably marked by an extreme formal perfection, incorporate different languages and media, from sculpture and installation to video, photography and light boxes.
The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, is a revisitation of his most significant and representative works of the past twenty years.
Catalog Edizioni Corraini │ essays by Gabi Scardi, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Paul Gilroy, Paolo Fabbri, Nicole Schweizer.
"It is difficult"
From 3/10/2008 to 25/1/2009
General information:
Hangar Bicocca, tel. +39 02 853531764; www.hangarbicocca.it
Spazio Oberdan, tel. +39 02 77406300/6302; www.provincia.milano.it/cultura
Retrospective exhibition and public project
promoted by Provincia di Milano and by Hangar Bicocca
curated by Gabi Scardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
opening: October 2, 2008 from 6 pm
An architect by training, since become both artist and film maker, Alfredo Jaar was born in Chile in 1956, growing up during the military dictatorship of Pinochet, where he produced numerous works explicitly critical of the regime. In 1982 he moved to New York and for the next two decades participated in major international exhibitions.
Over the course of his career, Alfredo Jaar has tirelessly investigated the ways that art can interact with the broader social and political context, addressing issues of great topical relevance, largely focusing on events of humanitarian urgency, political oppression, social marginalization, and human and civil rights abuse. He concentrates particularly on situations that the public conscience tends to ignore, and on the rhetoric with which the media manipulates and filters informations. The artist gets directly involved with these causes, giving voices and faces to the victims and witnesses.
Jaar believes in a correlation between ethics and esthetics. He attributes fundamental importance to the active and socially responsible role of culture and insists on the need to reiterate, through the creative energy of art, ethical positions that are not afraid to be openly critical in addressing such difficult arguments as injustice, genocide and humanitarian emergency.
His works, invariably marked by an extreme formal perfection, incorporate different languages and media, from sculpture and installation to video, photography and light boxes.
The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, is a revisitation of his most significant and representative works of the past twenty years.
Catalog Edizioni Corraini │ essays by Gabi Scardi, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Paul Gilroy, Paolo Fabbri, Nicole Schweizer.