M HKA Ensembles

Installation, 127 x 29.2 x 22.8 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community (Inv. no. BK006939-001).

In the Real Pictures series, Jaar brought together a highly differentiated mass of photographic imagery related to the Rwandese genocide of 1994, which Jaar himself was (more or less directly) a witness to. These materials were collected in black archival boxes that were stacked on top of each other to resemble three black towers. The clinical minimalist aesthetic of Jaar’s ’sculptures’ contrasts grossly with their highly charged ethical content. The complete “Real Pictures” project consists of 550 color photographs of genocidal horror, none of it accessible to the audience’s ambivalent gaze – a cynical commentary upon the relative torpor of the global mass media in responding to the world’s bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War.