Alfredo Jaar: Politics of the Image

New York-based Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar presents six works at the South London Gallery born of his enduring interest in Africa.

Jhe exhibition brings together the extraordinarily powerful multi-media installation The Sound of Silence (2006); the artist's first film, Muxima (2005); and four photographic works: The Power of Words (1984), Searching for Africa in Life (1996), From Time to Time (2006) and Greed (2007). These six works provide a fascinating insight into Jaar's 25-year long engagement with Africa and his contribution to the ongoing debate among art and cultural critics about documentary photography's contested relationship to suffering.

Housed in an austere zinc-clad light-box, the 8-minute silent film in The Sound of Silence exposes the social history around a single image of a young victim of the 1990s Sudanese famine, overlooked by a vulture. The image won a Pulitzer Prize, but the South African photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide after being vilified by the public for not having intervened to save the child's life. Jaar's poetic but hard-hitting work highlights the problematic issues surrounding the image - from personal history to copyright law - to unearth some of the broader socio-political concerns related to the West's responsibility to Africa and the developing world.

The exhibition runs from Saturday February 16th to Sunday April 6th. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from 12pm to 6pm.

Find out more about the South London Gallery.

How to get there

The closest tube station is a bus ride away at Elephant and Castle.

If travelling by bus the 12, 36, 171, 345 and 436 all serve the area.