Stone Cold: Alfredo Jaar’s ‘Men Who Cannot Cry’

Published on ArtThrob, 22 January 2019.

“I am largely distrustful of artists who take as their subject the pain of others, however worthy their intent, distrustful of that old brand of liberalism that might better be called essentialising moralism. Jaar is best known for The Rwanda Project 1994-2000, a series of works he produced after visiting that country during the 1994 genocide, and for which he received international acclaim. ‘I am irresistibly attracted to Africa,’ Jaar said in a 2005 interview, The Aesthetics of Witnessing. ‘There is something about that continent that moves me deeply. I feel I must devote concentrated effort and energy in order to expose what is happening there and to trigger some kind of reaction and solidarity.’ En passant, The Rwanda Project has never, as far as I can tell, been exhibited in Rwanda. His other projects, too, take human suffering as their subject, from the 1973 military coup in his native Chile to American black sites, the homeless of Montreal, the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake. And now our own recent past.”

Read the full review here.