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Alfredo Jaar

The End of the World
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art

The Primary Materials That Wars Are Made Of

Alfredo Jaar (b. Santiago de Chile, 1956; lives and works in New York) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker. For over four decades, he has dedicated himself to complex social and political issues and the limitations and ethics of representation. Economic and social imbalances in connection with the exploitation of resources in the Global South by the Global North, unequal power relations, and media manipulation prompt Jaar’s probing research, interventions, and works spanning the media of photography, film, and installation. 

In The End of the World, which grew out of a multi-year research project assisted by the human geographer and political geologist Adam Bobbette, Jaar shines a spotlight on the struggle for resources, which is a central and ever more salient factor in international conflicts. The site-specific work, a cube measuring 4 × 4 × 4 centimeters, is composed of several such resources: cobalt, rare earths, copper, tin, nickel, lithium, manganese, coltan, germanium, and platinum. These ten strategic metals are of vital importance in the fields of digital technology and electromobility, for high-tech applications and storage media. As demand for them has grown steadily, their extraction has been accompanied by massive human rights violations and environmental destruction. Jaar astutely observes these lines of conflict that convulse our planet. His artistic research is complemented by essays by Adam Bobbette and Nancy Princenthal and an introduction by Kathrin Becker.