Kevin... Kevin Carter

Alfredo Jaar, Muxima, 2005, digital video, 36'. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar’s latest solo exhibition Politics of the Image opened at the South London Gallery last week and runs until 6 April. At the opening, Alfredo took the press on a tour of his solo show which presents six works born of his 25-year long engagement with Africa. A talk with the artist will be held at Tate Modern on 13 March in the Starr Auditorium. The following are excerpts:
On Muxima (2005): Muxima means heart in the indigenous language of Angola. 'This piece is a 36-minute film. I did a six-year long project in Rwanda about genocide, which left one million people dead, in the face of the criminal indifference of the rest of the world. That project marked me and I had psychological difficulties going back to Africa. I was looking for a way to go back in a different mood and music gave me that occasion. For 20 years, I’ve been collecting contemporary African music of Portuguese influence, particularly music from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, which is the most extraordinary music being produced today. A few years ago, I was organising my Angolan music collection and I realised by chance that I had six different versions of the same song called Muxima, and I put them in chronological order. The earliest one was from 1956 and the latest from 1998 and just by listening to that song, I realised the different interpretations you could hear and how you could understand the history of Angola by the different interpretations occurring at different historical moments. I decided this was a marvellous device to make a film so I went to Angola a few times and then I wrote a script.

I wanted to give an overview of Angola today, to talk about the country, the people, AIDS, and oil production etc. Again following the logic of my work, I didn’t want to use any insulting, stereotypical images you have seen in the media by now. The film is divided into 10 cantos, a canto is a verse, so it’s a visual construct in different poetic stanzas and here the canto structure allows me to suggest. I cannot say everything, it’s just segments fragments of a reality and each canto is structured like a Haiku – like a short Japanese poem. It focuses on one, two or three elements because I wanted to use as few elements as possible to convey as much as possible. The logic also was to force people to listen to this song ten times. Most people leave the space with that song embedded in their brain; they have no choice because they have heard it ten times. For me, that’s one way to give you a little bit of Angola and to leave with Angola in your head, so you start by learning a song. This is just a symbolic starting point for you to learn something else.'

On the multi-media installation The Sound of Silence (2006): 'I always wanted to a huge piece dedicated to thinking about a single image and this is what it is. It is a theatre for one image, four metres by four metres by eight metres so it is around 128 cubic meters. The film is shown for eight minutes and it’s all about a single image. (The image from the 1990s Sudanese famine won a Pulitzer Prize and was taken by South African Photographer Kevin Carter, who later committed suicide). We were educated in order to read, read words, read letters, read sentences, but no one has taught us how to look, how to see, we are bombarded by thousands of images every day. So this show is about the way images make us see the world in a very specific way; images are not innocent. You go inside and there’s a film that lasts eight minutes telling a story of an image. I tried to keep an outsider position, as objective as possible, but it is impossible to remain objective. In between the lines you might see some references but basically I tried to keep it as neutral as possible. It’s like a Greek tragedy - there is a chorus that repeats during the film.'

On the photographic work Searching for Africa in Life (1996): 'This includes over 2500 covers of Life magazine from the first magazine cover in 1931. I started this insane work 1986. Following the earlier point about, how do we learn about the world? In school and through our parents, and the images that surround us. Part of the world grew up with Life magazine, first in black and white, then in colour, telling them about the world before television.'

On the photographic work From Time to Time (2006): 'This piece was finished in 1996, ten years later and it is, in a way, a remake of the earlier piece but with Time magazine. I’d been collecting these covers and I was trying to do something with them and then when this one came out I realised that I had completed the trio I wanted to do the piece. Here is the way Africa has been treated by Time magazine, which replaced Life, which is a fundamental news weekly. So again, there are animals, hunger and famine. This is what we learn – never a positive image – never science, never music, never humanity; nothing. We grow up with these images, when we see an African kid, immediately we think about this, we never think about anything else. The media has robbed them of their humanity.'

On Greed (2007): 'In the same way that I moved from 2500 covers to nine covers, then I just decided to put a single cover which happened in December of last year. When I saw it, I almost fainted, I couldn’t believe it. It says: Can greed save Africa?... and of course, there’s another animal with an open mouth because of the greed. This was very, very shocking. This really is a prototypical of the media representations of Africa.'

On The Power of Words (1984): 'This is really the graphic version of a small installation. The installation consists of a photograph of a typewriter and there's a hole and a red neon light at the back and this was hung on the wall. I had a slide projector – at the time we used slide projectors – and the slide projector projected images in the space where the paper should sit. Instead of projecting words, I projected images from the media of the time. This is when there was an accident at Union Carbide in Bhopal, India which left thousands of people dead and thousands of people blind. Each one of these images represents a historic moment. Here is the Invasion of Grenada (1983). Instead of putting words, I put images, but I still call it The Power of Words. This is really about the inadequacy of words or images to tell a story. It’s very difficult to represent reality, we cannot represent reality - I’ve always said that we always create a new reality. This piece is about this inadequacy. We think we write but we’re really conveying an image and this image also is not innocent, it needs words to actually have a very precise meaning, so it’s about confusion.'

Question: Can you comment on why you are so interested in Africa? 'There are many answers but the two official ones are that I lived, from the age of five to fifteen, on a small French island called Martinique. I became a little Martiniquette and when I left at fifteen it was very difficult as I had managed to identify with the people and the place, and had created very strong links with the people. That’s the more sentimental and more biographical story. The second is that I grew up and discovered the media and the power of the media and because of the geopolitics of African history, I started focusing on Africa. I moved to New York in 1982 and immediately realised that in the art world, the world of culture, Africa and Asia and Latin America didn’t exist. You see artists from all over the planet but 30 years ago it wasn’t like this; a few Americans and a few Germans - that was an international show. It was unimaginable in 1986 that they would invite an artist from Africa or Latin America - that was 22 years ago - and they invited me to the Venice Biennale, it was the first time that they had invited an artist from Latin America. When I came to NY in ’82, I realised that the art world was a world of fiction; it wasn’t representing the world and I wanted to bring the real world into the art world, to bring works and ideas, and Africa took centre stage. The work is always about me and our relationship, in the so-called Western world, to Africa. I’m never speaking for an African, or for Rwandans or for Nigerians or for South Africans, when I do this work I try never to speak for anybody but myself.'

Question: In terms of looking at the range of work on show here and you talking about your motivations, are there any pieces that you think are particularly successful and bring all the elements you have talked about together? 'I’m very critical about my work. Normally, when I see the work with distance, I say, 'This is terrible, I could have done this'. These selections are all works which have been shown before and have had extraordinary impact. The films are some of my stronger works. We have shown the new one six times, and the other maybe a dozen times, and we always get, invariably, the same reaction no matter where we show it. It premiered in Namibia, then we showed it in Angola and the States. As an artist after 30 years of doing this, you start to understand when something works and when it doesn’t; you see it in people’s reactions and what they tell you. I think these two (The Sound of Silence and Muxima) work very well.'