Back to list For his forthcoming solo show at the South London
Gallery, New York-based Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar
presents six works born of his enduring interest in
Africa. Jaar has exhibited extensively internationally,
featuring most recently at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and
is represented in the permanent collections of major
institutions around the world including MoMA and Tate
Modern, but this will be the first opportunity in
fifteen years to see a significant body of his work in London. The exhibition brings together the
extraordinarily powerful multi-media installation The
Sound of Silence (2006); the artist’s first film, Muxima
(2005); and four photographic works: The Power of Words
(1984), Searching for Africa in Life (1996), From Time
to Time (2006) and Greed (2007). These six works provide
a fascinating insight into Jaar’s 25-year long
engagement with Africa and his contribution to the
ongoing debate among art and cultural critics about
documentary photography’s contested relationship to suffering. Housed in an austere zinc-clad light-box, the
8-minute silent film in The Sound of Silence exposes the
social history around a single image of a young victim
of the 1990s Sudanese famine, overlooked by a vulture.
The image won a Pulitzer Prize, but the South African
photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide after being
vilified by the public for not having intervened to save
the child’s life. Jaar’s poetic but hard-hitting work
highlights the problematic issues surrounding the image
– from personal history to copyright law – to unearth
some of the broader socio-political concerns related to
the West’s responsibility to Africa and the developing world. A sensitive and uplifting counter to the imagery
and silence of the works in the main gallery space,
Muxima (2005), is rooted in Jaar’s love of African music
and the belief that music can resonate with, and
therefore help communicate, the experiences of the
people. Muxima, (meaning ‘heart’ in Kimbundu, an
indigenous language of Angola), looks at the history of
Angola through a series of different renditions of a
traditional folk song of the same name. The work traces
a sense of Angola’s colonial past and maps its present,
touching on issues such as the aftermath of civil war,
AIDS and oil production. Recently shown to great acclaim
within the African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in
2007, Muxima exemplifies the intellectual rigour and
poetry which pervades Alfredo Jaar’s practice. The SLG will be closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. | 
