A

Alfredo Jaar has been creating works that focus on social issues since the early years of his career. For this, his first solo exhibition at a museum in Tokyo, the artist and the museum engaged in dialogue from the very early stages of preparation. Why choose someone’s misfortune or the world’s conflicts as subject matter? What do artists wish to achieve thereby? What do artists hope for?
This dialogue led to aspiration: Disasters in distant lands can seem like other people's stories. Yet, we cannot be unrelated to them, through the choices we make every day, we are, in fact, participants. Could we create an exhibition that allows visitors to feel, after leaving, that we are all involved?
The exhibition begins with a section composed of works from the early part of his career, reflecting on the artist’s own life. Tracing Jaar’s footsteps—born in Chile, South America and later fleeing to settle in the United States from the dictatorship that began with the coup of 11 September 1973—it presents the process through which his gaze toward social issues was cultivated.

B

After the discovery of gold in the 1970s, Serra Pelada in northeastern Brazil became a large-scale open-pit gold mine in the 1980s. Jaar visited the area in 1985, photographing the mining site and the people working there. Behind their work in these appalling conditions lay the individual desire for a fortune, and deeper still, the structural inequality forcing them into such brutal labour precisely because they belonged to a capitalist underdeveloped country.
The Gold in the Morning series lays bare the global imbalance sustained by exploitation. The gold they unearthed, enduring poverty and danger, is indispensable to our lives, not only as jewellery but as a component of countless industrial products. Needless to say, there is a vast disparity between the global market price of gold and the compensation received by Brazilian miners. Consequently, a structure emerges in which we, too, are complicit in exploitation. In this series, Jaar guides us beyond the overwhelming visual experience towards a deeper reflection on our own complicity.

C

In the early 1990s, amidst intensifying inter-ethnic tensions, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a territory where different ethnic groups lived together, saw conflict over independence. The declaration of independence, pushed through by the majority, plunged the country into inter-ethnic warfare.
Europa takes as its subject the Bosnian War, described as the most brutal battlefield in post-war Europe. Thirty years after the outbreak of the Bosnian War, another battle between neighbouring countries is going on between Russia and Ukraine. Our everyday society has become increasingly diverse and information-driven, ushering in an era where the differing values of our neighbours are starkly apparent. This information-driven society, which both heightens wariness towards “difference” and facilitates recognition of “divergence”, is fostering intolerance among people. The burning flame of Europa and the hands of those on the battlefield hidden behind it pose a question: Can we be neighbours even if we are different?

D

Kevin Carter entered Sudan in 1993 as a photojournalist amidst famine and civil war. He captured the photo Vulture and Girl, which later won him a Pulitzer Prize. This photograph, published in The New York Times, instantly sparked controversy. Why did he not help the child before taking the photograph? Does freedom of the press take precedence over saving a life?
These ethical questions should not be directed solely at the photographer. The media published the photograph and generated sales. It was the general public who bought it. Considering this dynamic, one realises that the photograph which caused such a sensation was not only “taken by the photographer” but also “taken because we made him take it”.
What Jaar demonstrates in The Sound of Silence is that all of us here, now, are current participants in this controversy. This implication is further reinforced by its connection to the work You Do Not Take a Photograph. You Make It. The sequence linking this work—which sharply questions the ethics of image production—with The Sound of Silence directs our consciousness towards the responsibility that those who consume images must bear.

E

Jaar, the recipient of the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018, presented his new work Hiroshima Hiroshima in his solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2023. In this work, the first to receive permission for drone filming directly above the Atomic Bomb Dome, the footage descends straight towards the dome from above, so that viewers to become the eye of the atomic bomb itself. As the camera nears, the dome shifts into animation and begins to rotate. Viewers are placed within an installation that involves physical experience.
Tomorrow Is Another Day may be regarded as a quintessential example of Jaar’s artistic practice, in which he distils elements to their utmost minimum while articulating an incisive message. In this work, Jaar prompts viewers to extend their reflection to the present relationship between Japan and U.S., and the world at large, at a time of turmoil and transformation.
On the premise that others hold different values, we must nonetheless strive to understand them, persistently contemplating and acting to build relationships. Jaar demonstrates that, in the present era, this stance constitutes precisely the step that we are able, and required, to take.