Alfredo JaarMilan, 1946: Lucio Fontana visits his studio on his return from Argentina, 2013
In ‘Milan, 1946: Lucio Fontana visits his studio on his return from Argentina’, Alfredo Jaar works with a historical photograph of the Italian artist standing among the ruins of his Milan studio, destroyed during the Second World War. The image captures a moment of profound cultural significance: Fontana’s return from Argentina and the broader reawakening of Italy’s artistic and intellectual life after years of conflict and isolation. It marks the beginning of a post-war resurgence in which artists, writers and filmmakers sought not only to rebuild physical spaces, but also to restore the spirit of Italian culture. This cultural renewal included figures such as Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica in cinema, Moravia, Pavese and Ungaretti in literature, and a later generation of artists and filmmakers including Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Pistoletto, Boetti and Calzolari, all of whom contributed to shaping a revitalised Italian and international cultural scene.
Jaar first presented the work at the 2013 Venice Biennale as part of his project Venezia, Venezia. The installation served as a call to artists and intellectuals around the world to reconsider the dominant systems that structure contemporary art and the ways in which cultural narratives are represented globally. By returning to a moment of historical resilience and creative renewal, Jaar not only honours the legacy of those who rebuilt Italy’s cultural life, but also invites a reflection on how artists today might imagine new models of solidarity, visibility and critical engagement.
Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect and filmmaker whose work critically examines social injustice, human suffering and the ethics of representation. His practice often takes the form of conceptually driven installations that reframe existing media, isolating specific advertisements, news articles or magazine covers and recontextualising them within the gallery or museum space. By doing so, Jaar exposes the mechanisms through which information is constructed, circulated and consumed. In certain works, such as Welcome to the USA (TIME)’, he subtly alters the original image or text to subvert its intended message and highlight the biases embedded within Western media narratives.
This work featured prominently in Jaar’s 2024 exhibition at his London gallery, ‘IF IT CONCERNS US, IT CONCERNS YOU’, which presented a compelling survey of his forty-year engagement with media critique. The exhibition brought together a selection of key works that trace Jaar’s sustained interrogation of how news imagery influences public perception, particularly in relation to global conflict, migration and inequality. Through his practice, Jaar invites viewers to reconsider the politics of visibility and the responsibilities that come with bearing witness.
