Alfredo JaarSix Seconds, 2000
‘Six Seconds’ originates from a brief and haunting encounter Alfredo Jaar had in 1994 at the Nyagazambu refugee camp, situated east of Kigali in Rwanda. There, he photographed a young girl who had just discovered that her parents had been killed by a Hutu militia. Visibly traumatised and searching for her family, the girl disappeared into the crowd before Jaar could learn her name or hear her story. Their exchange lasted only six seconds, and the only trace of that moment is a single, out-of-focus photograph. The blurred image became, for Jaar, a powerful metaphor for the fragility of memory and the limitations of bearing witness through art.
Presented as a colour transparency in a lightbox, ‘Six Seconds’ uses poetic restraint to evoke the weight of loss and the difficulty of representation. The girl’s indistinct form, receding into a veil of motion and light, becomes a quiet but potent presence – an emblem of lives disrupted and histories erased. Rather than depict violence directly, Jaar offers a contemplative space in which absence and ambiguity take on emotional and ethical depth. The work is part of his broader ‘Rwanda Project’, a multi-year effort to grapple with the aftermath of genocide and explore how art might honour the dignity of those affected, even when words and images fall short.
