Alfredo Jaar: “It Is Difficult” lecture
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015 7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Shanghai Himalayas Museum (3M, Zon3e A, No.869, Yinghua Road, Pudong District, Shanghai)
Alfredo Jaar, an artist, architect, and filmmaker known as of one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today, will present his first lecture in Shanghai at the Himalayas Museum on Tuesday, August 11th, 2015.
He will introduce his most recent projects realized around the world, including places such as Fukushima, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Leipzig, Santiago, New York, and other locations. He will also present a selection of his most iconic works like A Logo for America (1987), his historic public intervention revived last year in Times Square, New York, and The Skoghall Konsthall (2000), the world’s first paper museum which he created only to burn to the ground 24 hours after its creation in order to ignite a community’s yearning for a space for culture. The artist will also discuss his early Hong Kong projects documenting the hundreds of thousands of so-called “boat people” who fled Vietnam’s post-war crushing poverty in the late 1970s and landed in Hong Kong, searching for a better life. His various projects, namely Untitled (Water) (1990) and A Hundred Times Nguyen (1994), were created from photographs he took in the 1980s when he visited Hong Kong’s refugee camps. The grim ocean passages, refugees, detention camps, and the intolerable conditions of the unpredictable and often interminable wait for refugee status are an unfortunate echo to scenes we can now observe on shores throughout the world.
Alfredo Jaar’s installations and public interventions have earned him international acclaim. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A major retrospective of his work took place in 2012 at three institutions in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V. and Alte Nationalgalerie. In 2014 the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki hosted the most extensive retrospective of his career. Currently, a major exhibition is taking place at MAC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille, France (Nous l’avons tant aimée, la révolution, July 3, 2015 – January 10, 2016)
The artist has realized more than sixty public interventions around the world. Over fifty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA in Chicago, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, the Tate in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid, MACBA in Barcelona, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, MAXXI and MACRO in Rome and dozens of other institutions and private collections worldwide.
