ALFREDO JAAR | LA FIN DU MONDE

The catalogue features texts by Allyn Aglaïa and Adam Bobette that situate the work in the artist's practice and detail the sociologial histories of the minerals that make up the work. 

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Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker. His works have been exhibited worldwide, and he has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over 70 monographs have been published on his work. He has received numerous awards, including the Prix Pictet (2025), IV Mediterranean Albert Camus Prize (2024), the Hasselblad Award (2020), and the Hiroshima Art Prize (2018). He lives in New York and Lisbon.

On a series of 5 lightboxes, Jaar has compiled the entire archive of LIFE magazine covers between 1936 and 1996 - 2,128 covers in all. At the time, LIFE was the magazine of reference in the United States. It was the first and most influential all-photographic news magazine. With over thirteen million weekly readers at its peak, its mission was to provide the country with a window into the world. When LIFE’s publisher, Henry Luce, launched the publication, his stated purpose was “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…” However, the scarcity of covers featuring African subjects throughout the magazine’s sixty-year circulation provides an opportunity to reevaluate this claim. Searching for Africa in LIFE reflects historical American attitudes about culture and race – attitudes that continue to reverberate today.

Jaar draws on the archive – the complete collection of LIFE Magazine covers – to offer an exploration of the politics of representation in mainstream media and to interrogate our own assumptions about culture and ethnicity. More precisely, Jaar points to the formation and distribution of knowledge around these issues. What emerges in Searching for Africa in LIFE is a failure to inform, a failure to represent. The diversity and complexities of a rich culture, in this case, the continent and peoples of Africa, are largely ignored and reduced to a handful of patronizing, exoticising images. Searching for Africa in LIFE questions the currency of media constructions by calling attention to the power of material collections to reposition our gaze and to bring to light readings, and mis-readings, of our histories.

Written in bright neon, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (2016) quotes the eight final words of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable. Employing Beckett’s signature use of the generative aporia — a contradiction that creates — the work offers a perfect metaphor for the current era, which Jaar describes as “a time of absolute chaos and confusion, where the collapse of ideologies and traditional politics is amplified by a dazzling array of technological developments; an era of alternative realities, otherwise known as the post-truth moment.”

The artist uses the tropes of media and advertising - here the neon sign - to engage the viewer. Divided into two lines, the piece is structured to describe a cycle of hope and despair. While the first line, red and compact, seems to recede in the background, the second, bright and large, appears louder, as if shouted, encouraging us to resist the temptation to give up.

Beckett’s words also echo a well-known statement by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher that Jaar often references for his own continual engagement with the seemingly intractable social problems of our time. Gramsci described the coexistence of the  “pessimism of his intellect and the optimism of his will.”

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On offers a way through the impasse of our feelings of powerlessness in the face of catastrophes larger than we can control: to recognize despair and move on, with optimism.

Studies in Happiness (1979-81) is one of Jaar's first works. This poetic, participatory and political project lays the foundation for much of his work to follow. In Chile between 1979 and 1981 Alfredo Jaar asked people on the street the simple question "are you happy?"  The naivete of the approach was a subversive way to open public dialogue in the repressive context of extreme censorship and fear during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The gallery is very pleased to share a rare selection of vintage prints of the project. Street scenes of Santiago are interspersed with billboards that ask this existential and ever relevant question. The works offer an early glimpse into the themes and modalities that Jaar would employ throughout his career. They are also striking and intimate works in themselves - at once timely and timeless.