ALFREDO JAAR is a Chilean born artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice 1986, 2007, São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010), Sydney (1990), Istanbul (1995), Kwangju (1995, 2000), Johannesburg (1997), and Moscow (2009), as well as Documenta (1987, 2002). He recently completed two important public commissions: The Park of the Laments for the Indianapolis Museum of Art and The Geometry of Conscience, located next to the new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile. He is also completing a third memorial in Kigali, Rwanda in memory of the victims of the 1994 genocide.
Important recent individual exhibitions include Hangar Bicocca and Spazio Oberdan, Milan (2008), Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007), Fundación Telefónica, Santiago (2006), MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992), Whitechapel, London (1992), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992).
He is preparing a multi-venue retrospective in Berlin for 2012, including the Neue Nationalgalerie and NGBK.
He has created more than fifty public interventions around the world.
More than fifty monographic publications have been published about his work. These include It Is Difficult (2008), the exhibition catalogue for his retrospective in Milan, featuring essays by Gabi Scardi, Paolo Fabbri, Paul Gilroy, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Nicole Schweizer; La Politique des Images (2006), with essays by Griselda Pollock, Jacques Rancière, Nicole Schweizer and Georges Didi-Huberman; The Fire This Time (2005), with essays by Mary Jane Jacob and Nancy Princenthal; and Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994-1998 (1998), with essays by Vicenç Altaió, David Levi Strauss and Ben Okri.
He received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius” grant (2000), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). In 2006 he received Spain's Premio Extremadura a la Creación.
Moderated by Rafael Goldchain
RAFAEL GOLDCHAIN is a photo media artist, professor and program coordinator of the Applied Photography Program at Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville. His photographs have been exhibited in Canada, Chile, the US, Cuba, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and Mexico, and are featured in many private and public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.
Presented by Latin American Canadian Art Projects and Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art
