Alfredo Jaar: decolonial time and the aesthetics of the unfinished

"Alfredo Jaar is the first academic survey of the Chilean-born, New York based artist Alfredo Jaar.

Based on ten years of archival research, interviews with the artist and his contemporaries, and a transdisciplinary analysis of iconic, lesser-known, and totally unknown works, this book argues that decolonial time has been centrally informing Jaar's art from the outset of his career in the early 1970s, propelling him to create an aesthetic project that is essentially unfinished, just as the decolonial itself.

Examining decolonial temporality through the concepts of mourning, accountability, and failure, Florencia San Martín specifically maintains that Jaar's art overall has been informed by two interconnected historical events: the 1973 US-backed military coup in Chile and its corollary neoliberal economic system, adopted there for the first time globally.

In reading Jaar's art from the perspective of the Americas, San Martín further reframes the discussion around the photographic and the ethics of representation in Jaar's literature by revealing the crucial role of radical poetry, transnational solidarities, investigate journalism, international jurisdiction, and critical discourses on hope in the artist's five-decade career"-- Provided by publisher.