LA FIN DU MONDE: ALFREDO JAAR

La Fin du Monde, the first exhibition by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar at the gallery, focuses on extractive industries and the global supply chains of critical minerals — the natural resources required for the tools and technologies essential to our daily life, from our phones to computers to electric cars. The exhibition centers on a single work The End of the World (2023-2024) composed of ten of the most precious minerals in the world: cobalt, rare earths, copper, tin, nickel, lithium, manganese, coltan, germanium, and platinum.

As resource wars loom throughout the world, from the devastation of lithium mining in the Atacama desert in the artist’s native Chile to the explicit imperialism of US President Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and public negotiations around access to Ukraine’s natural resources, La Fin du Monde brings the artist’s capacity to make us feel the injustice of the world to the capital of Europe.  

To prepare the work, the artist spent five years researching in collaboration with political geologist Adam Bobette. “Critical minerals are ‘critical’ not by nature but by politics,” Bobette writes in the introduction to his series of ten essays, one on each of the minerals in the work. While tracing the complex trajectories and the human consequences of the extraction and trade of these resources, Bobette also calls for a new ontology, to shift our relationship with nature from a supposed divide between humans with agency and raw materials which are conceived of as dead matter, to an ecological community with the earth itself. “Imagining new forms of mining which are non-violent towards humans and nature requires a profoundly creative act: a novel ontology of geology which acknowledges that it is social through and through, that it makes demands upon us, that we are in debt to it for our very being. To mine, then, should not be about taking dead matter from the earth but to request permission to participate in an earthly process and enter a collaboration with a planetary capacity for transformation, to reconfigure what it means to be human through the modification of geologic materials.”

The grandiose nave of the gallery is a space with the capacity to showcase the work’s dramatic play of scale and light. The surrounding emptiness is an essential part of the experience of the work, an attempt to give the object, and all it represents, the gravitas it merits. “I am trying to reduce the complexity of this problem of this collapsing planet into something concrete,” Jaar said.