Alfredo Jaar (Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished)

In Alfredo Jaar, the first critical academic survey devoted to the prominent Chilean-born artist, Florencia San Martín shows how his work takes up mourning, accountability, and failure, offering a new model for how to think about global contemporary art today.

In Alfredo Jaar, Florencia San Martín analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity that obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. San Martín argues that Jaar’s work represents decolonial time, exposing the limits of the violent systems we inhabit. His art, she maintains, is informed by and responds to two interconnected historical events relevant to his own life: the US-backed military coup that established Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile and the implementation around the world of the corollary neoliberal economic system. San Martín explores the key themes in Jaar’s artistic practice—mourning, accountability, and failure—which situates the victims of the Chilean regime in a global context, directly confronts the architects of atrocity, and questions how ideas of diversity and inclusion have been co-opted by modern neoliberal discourses. Alfredo Jaar enables us to reimagine art history, offering a fresh paradigm with which to think about global contemporary art.