Artist, Alfredo Jaar: My name is Alfredo Jaar, and this is Lament of the Images.
Director, Glenn Lowry: In this work, Jaar presents three stories from around the world that deal with issues of photography and representation. Before making it, he had photographed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Alfredo Jaar: About a million people were killed in less than a hundred days. I was blocked because I realized I had documented the genocide that nobody cared. No one was interested in these images. And so I had to invent new ways of representing the genocide. And each one became an exercise in how to represent the unrepresentable. When I finally moved onto other projects, my relationship with photography and issues of representation had been radically altered. And at that moment I created Lament of the Images.
Glenn Lowry: Press pause to read the stories, if you like. When you’ve finished, move into the next room and press play to hear more from the artist.
Alfredo Jaar: I felt light was the ideal material and the most simple and the most poetic and the most poignant to convey this blindness. If you put all the colors together, the result is white. So this white screen that is blinding you is really the totality of all colors. You could argue it's the totality of all life together there in front of you. So this work is asking you, "Let there be light … I want to see." And of course, as you know, “Let there be light" means also "I want justice … I want the truth." So the work is really about the absence of images.