The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam is exhibiting the controversial artwork The Sound of Silence by Alfredo Jaar from Saturday 19 January to Sunday 24 February. In this exhibition the leading Chilean artist Jaar follows Christian Boltanski’s installation Chance and is the second artist to create an installation using up an entire room in the ZWART/WIT (BLACK/WHITE) programme of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.
From 2012 to 2014 the museum has a ZWART/WIT theme. Installations, exhibitions and activities on this theme will be presented for three years. For the past 30 years the work of Alfredo Jaar has been inspired by violations of human rights.His work, based on photographs, films, installations and texts, responds to current international events and touches on themes such as social and economic inequality, genocide, refugees, border conflicts and the role of photojournalism. Another theme of The Sound of Silence is the role and influence of the image in western society.

The Sound of Silence.
A rectangular construction with blinding light tells the story of the photojournalist Kevin Carter, who witnessed the famine in Sudan in 1993. In The Sound of Silence the problem of the image has central place, the controversial relationship between photography, and violence and human suffering. In an age when photographs of horrific acts have become commonplace and interchangeable, Jaar poses critical questions about media consumerism, empathy and individual responsibility, and denounces the “collective silence”.

About Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar (1956, Chile) is an internationally famous artist, architect and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited all over the world. He has participated in the Biennales in Venice (1986, 2007, 2009), São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010), Sydney (1990), Istanbul (1995), Gwangju (1995, 2000), Johannesburg (1997), Seville (2006) and Liverpool (2010), and in the Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). He has created more than sixty works involving interventions in public spaces and more than fifty monographs have been published on his work. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow since 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow since 2000. In 2006 he was awarded the Spanish Premio Extremadura a la Creación. Alfredo Jaar will represent the country of his birth, Chile, at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

About ZWART/WIT
The contrast between black and white plays an important role in everyday life. The ZWART/WIT programme deals with thinking in terms of black and white, as well as with the cultural, political, anthropological and historical connotations of this contrast. Black-white has been the norm in our visual culture for many years, and even today people are experimenting with this theme in all sorts of ways in photography, film, the visual arts, advertising, graphic design, fashion, architecture and design. With this total concept of ZWART/WIT, the museum is presenting itself as the photo museum in the Netherlands in the field of historical and contemporary photography which looks across the borders and has social relevance. The programme, developed and composed by the curator Anne van der Zwaag, is supported by an extremely generous and exceptional contribution from the Wertheimer Foundation.

www.zwartwit.nu