Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956. He studied architecture and filmmaking, graduating from the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura in 1979, and Universidad de Chile, Santiago, in 1981. He emigrated from Chile in 1982, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Jaar lives and works in Lisbon. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and exploring through it the unequal power relations and sociopolitical divisions that result from globalization.

Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020); SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2023), and KINDL, Berlin (2024).

His work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013 as Chile’s representative and in 2026); São Paulo Biennial (1985, 1987, and 2010); Istanbul Biennial (1995); and Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (1995 and 2000). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000.

Installation view, From dreams you wake up, Galerie Nordenhake Mexico City, 2024

Alfredo Jaar, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, 2025. Commissioned by for MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces as a part of the exhibition The Story of Public Art – Dancing in the Streets (on Power). Photo by Jan Søndergaard.