Alfredo Jaar was born in 1956 in Santiago de Chile, where he studied architecture and film direction. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide, including at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. A winner of a MacArthur igeniusi grant in 2000, Jaar has also participated in the biennials in Venice, S o Paulo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Istanbul and Kwangju.

Spanning from the 1970s until today, this compelling new monograph traces the development of the respected Chilean-born, New York-based conceptualist--from his earliest public interventions to his latest installations. Some of the highly political subjects range from the plight of Amazonian gold miners to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and there are several previously unpublished works that the artist created in his hometown of Santiago during Pinochet's repressive military dictatorship, as well as numerous works made by collating and rethinking press cuttings. Working with public interventions, installations, photography and video, Jaar examines the nature of images and their viewers' relationships to them. His work tackles the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility. Texts by art historians Georges Didi Huberman, Griselda Pollock and Nicole Schweizer and philosopher Jacques Ranciere.