http://imaginarymuseum.org/MHV/PZImhv/JaarRwandaProject.html
“Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project 1994-98 inspired a host of difficult and contradictory reactions. His subject is, as always, politically, socially and morally enormous. He deals with the systematic murder of Tutsi men, women and children by the Hutu death squads in the spring of 1994. In August of that year, Jaar went to Rwanda to see for himself what had happened, and took thousands of photographs. As testament and memorial, he focused on the survivors. In this presentation he singled out one in particular, Gutete Emerita, a young woman who witnessed the killing of her husband and two sons and who, with her daughter, miraculously escaped, hiding in a swamp for three weeks.” (Lilly Wei, Art in America, Dec, 1998)
The Rwanda Project attempts to counter and transform the conventions of photojournalism, which frequently objectifies violence through unmediated images of victimization. Alternatively, Jaar reverses the lens’ eye to focus on the eyes of the witnesses and the hauntingly beautiful landscape in which this massacre was enacted as a means of eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.
References:
http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/research/WtoS/Sever2.pdfhttp://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/08spring/chow.shtm
