When Alfredo Jaar was asked why his project on the Rwanda genocide took longer than any of his other projects to complete, he responded: “It was my most difficult project. That’s why The Rwanda Project lasted six years. I ended up doing twenty-one pieces in those six years. Each one was an exercise of representation. And how can I say this? They all failed.”[1]
The first project that Jaar produced as part of The Rwanda Project was “Signs of Life” (1994). While in Rwanda, Jaar found a set of tourist postcards with photos of Rwanda on the front. The photos showed bucolic landscapes, smiling people, and sun-drenched fields with wild animals. On the back of each postcard Jaar wrote the name of a Rwanda genocide survivor whom he had met while in Rwanda, pairing the name with the phrase “is still alive!” For example, one postcard read, “RUBANDA TRESIFOLI IS STILL ALIVE!” He mailed each postcard to friends outside of Rwanda in the United States, Europe, and Chile. The project declared the emergency that had occurred in Rwanda through the declaration that the survival of these individuals was a miracle.
The project mimics a work by conceptual artist, On Kawara. For Kawara’s work, I GOT UP (1970), the artist mailed touristic postcards of New York City to his friends and stamped each postcard with the date, the phrase “I GOT UP,” the time he had gotten up that day, and his current address. The project communicates Kawara’s existential questioning of his own life. Jaar mobilizes the same formal language as Kawara, but reverses the direction so that instead of probing inward at the self, it points outward to the Rwandan people, drawing attention to the lack of response on the part of the international community to the genocide in Rwanda. “Signs of Life” communicates the intensity of the genocide without showing images of violence. By mimicking Kawara’s piece but replacing the “I” with the name of a Rwanda genocide survivor, the project questions the insularity of the art world and the art-going public.
In an interview, Jaar recalled his experience in Rwanda as the most horrific of his life.[2] After his trip to Rwanda, he returned to the United States with over three thousand photographs but, upon further reflection, decided not to show them. He proposed that in order to intervene in the contemporary language of representation of “Africa” in and to Europe and the United States, he would withhold his photographs in protest against an economy of images constructed and upheld by the mass media. Jaar commented on his decision not to show his photographs of the aftermath of violence:
It didn’t make sense to use them; people did not react to these kinds of images. Why would they react now? I was starting to think that there must be another way to talk about violence without recurring to violence. There must be a way to talk about suffering without making the victim suffer again. How do you represent this, respecting the dignity of the people you are focusing on?[3]
Jaar calls for an intervention into modes of representation that rely on images of violence to communicate human suffering. He asks how the viewing subject is constituted in relation to representations of others, how subjects are constituted within a representational framework dictated by the mass media, and how visual representations influence human relationships on a global scale. Jaar’s point is to intervene in the kinds of semiotic violence perpetrated within the structure of the mass media. The mass-media constructs an imaginary of “Africa” in which the entire continent is imagined as separate from the rest of the world, existing in a different time and place along a neo-colonial teleological vision of “civilization.” Jaar’s work is not a call to audiences to travel to Rwanda on a charity mission. It is a demand for people to recognize the violence that is produced within the media; and it is an urgent call for people to approach the mass media with a critical eye and an awareness for the influence of visual images on transnational human relations. Jaar urges his audience to recognize the link between visual representation (and non-representation) and social justice (or lack of justice). Images can either mobilize or stifle intersubjective relationships and ethical responses, and it is Jaar’s purpose to draw attention to that dynamic.
The Rwanda Project grew out of Jaar’s disgust at the total lack of response by the European and American governments to the genocide that took place in Rwanda from March through August of 1994. He was horrified at the absence of assistance on the part of the U.N. and the refusal of the Clinton administration to refer to the event as genocide until after it was over. The Clinton Administration justified its inaction by avoiding the term “genocide,” purporting to absolve itself of the legal and ethical responsibility to provide assistance. The United States and France dispatched planes to evacuate their own citizens, but did not send any assistance for the Rwandan people. During the genocide, over half of the population of Rwanda was either killed or forced to flee the country, leading to the largest refugee crisis the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees had ever witnessed.[4]
Horrified at the lack of response from Europe and the United States, Jaar decided to travel to Rwanda to document the genocide. While there were already photojournalists in Rwanda, Jaar wanted to create a project that, in mobilizing the languages of conceptual art, would be able to reach people in a way that the media images had not. Sites of war, political conflict, and human suffering are the well-trodden territory of photojournalists, whose job it is to enter into places of conflict with their camera and bring back the image of a fallen soldier (Robert Capa), a starving Sudanese girl (Kevin Carter), or a migrant mother (Dorothea Lange). Instead of taking up the language of photojournalism, Jaar capitalizes on the languages of conceptual art in his representations of sites of human crisis. Other contemporary artists bridging the languages of art and journalism include Fazal Sheikh and Akram Zaatari. Not only does Jaar’s work interrogate the gap between the two fields, Jaar uses conceptual art to intervene into the languages of mass media.
This paper will focus on two works in The Rwanda Project that Jaar created several years after “Signs of Life”: “Untitled, Newsweek” and “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita.” Similarly to the earlier works, Jaar structures these two pieces as an address to a viewing public. The audiences he addresses are primarily in cities within Europe and the United States, as these are the places where the work has been most often exhibited.[5] Installed in a gallery setting, the piece addresses an art-going public, implicating them in the failure of response to the genocide and providing a platform for reflection on current sets of global relationships and the role that images play in those relationships.
I arrive at The Rwanda Project more than a decade after the work’s completion because it offers insight into how ethical injunctions emerge out of visual representations. I approach Jaar’s work as a vehicle by which to explore the ways that photographic images shape human relationships on a global scale. As a critique of media representations of human suffering, the project has become even more relevant since its completion. In the late 1990s, when Jaar completed these pieces, the Internet was still not a major source of news for the majority of people in the United States. Now, with the explosion of Internet usage, masses of people can view photographs of human suffering at an unprecedented scale and speed, and photos are often accompanied by live video footage. The New York Times includes daily video footage on their website homepage, each video linking to an entire searchable video archive. The Time magazine website hosts videos including “Hatred and Pity in Sudan,” “Desert Refugees in Algeria Await Recognition,” and “Hunting Children in Sudan;”[6] and The Washington Post has a link on their website homepage to their “Camera Works” page, which includes photos and “Documentary Videos” of the day. Now, more than ever, the structure of media representations yields great influence over public opinion on an international scale. Jaar’s work counters the contemporary structure of viral image circulation, urging for a more sustained analysis of the events in question. While an awareness of global events is certainly a benefit of networked image circulation, the effortless consumption of visual media runs the risk of creating a public that over-consumes and under-analyzes.
[1] Art 21 website. Interview with Alfredo Jaar on The Rwanda Project. (Accessed on October 22, 2009).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jo Thomas, “The Rwanda Disaster: Relief; Aid For Rwandans Stats to Arrive at Refuge in Zaire,” The New York Times, July 22, 1994.
[5] “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” was first exhibited in 1996 in Raleigh, North Carolina at the City Gallery of Contemporary Art.
[6]Time website. Video Archive.
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