Kiasma | Museum of Contemporary Art

ALFREDO JAAR
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
11 April - 7 September 2014

The overriding theme in the artist's large scale installations, films, photographs, objects, and neon works is human and social morals – our responsibility for our own fate and that of others. Presented on two floors at Kiasma, the retrospective show comprises more than 40 works from 1974–2014, including such ground-breaking works as Lament of the Images, The Silence of Nduwayezu and The Sound of Silence.

For this exhibition Kiasma will also re-create One Million Finnish Passports, Jaar's historic landmark work shown for the first time in Helsinki in 1995 and destroyed after the exhibition.

Born in Chile in 1956, Alfredo Jaar has lived in New York since 1982. An artist, architect and filmmaker whose installations and public interventions have earned him international acclaim throughout the world, the artist has previously exhibited individual works in Finland in both the 1995 and 2011 ARS exhibitions and in 2010 as part of the Capital of Culture year in Turku Archipelago.

The Head Curator of the exhibition is Museum Director Pirkko Siitari. The title of the exhibition, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, is the title of a poem by the late American writer Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), an important source of inspiration for the artist. The eponymous exhibition publication features eight new major essays and a conversation between the artist and Pirkko Siitari.