Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished, Florencia San Martín, 2026, Duke University Press
News that the last man wanted in connection with the military execution of the singer and leftwing activist Víctor Jara has finally been captured after years on the run is a reminder of how Chile continues to mourn.
It is small consolation for victims of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship that seized power in a US-backed coup in 1973—Jara’s wife, British dancer and activist Joan Jara, said “it is difficult to see this as justice” so long after the crime.
Nonetheless, the arrest of Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei—a fugitive who fled after being sentenced in absentia for murdering Jara—underlines how time itself takes on a different quality when it comes to collective memory and the pursuit of accountability.
Art historian Florencia San Martín would probably situate this within her understanding of “decolonial time” in her excellent survey of the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who is unrivalled in his insistence that we remember and pursue past crimes.
San Martín argues that in the context of the Americas, Jaar’s art exposes that in the time of coloniality, the oppressed are deprived of their memory and culture, simultaneously signalling the potential of art to resist and therefore exist in relational pasts, presents, and futures.
She notes the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman’s contribution to the decolonial debate by which America was not “discovered” but “invented”—two very different paradigms.
“Discovery” embraces the European imperialist, victorious perspective of the world’s linear history; and “invention” the perspective of those cast aside and expected to struggle on within a history in which they do not belong.
One work by Jaar that sought to capture this was his installation “Motherland, Motherland. What Mother, What Land?” from 1984, shown just once at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
This contrasts a drawing in the Boturini Codex showing the migration of the Chichimeca and Mexica from Aztlán to Tenochtitlán which eschews geographical contours for events, motion, and relations between divine, natural, human, and animal beings; with a 1594 engraving by Theodor de Bry representing the foundational moment in which time became linear—conqueror versus conquered, dressed and naked, foreground and background.
Jaar refuses to give up: his work today is as infused with mourning and anger at the violence of colonialism and its political manifestations as it is with persistent invitations to imagine another world is possible.
That work has been shaped by cutting socio-political commentary, spawned when he began his career during the early 1970s in Chile’s most hopeful, yet soon to become most disastrous, epoch.
As San Martín argues in this excellent survey, the forces that have driven him all derive from this period. She maintains that Jaar’s art has been informed by two interconnected historical events: the 1973 coup that ushered in the monstrous Chilean dictatorship, and its corollary neoliberal economic experiment that then unfolded globally.
Her assessment of what drives the art and thinking of this garlanded artist—now 70 and the winner of multiple global awards for his work—leads her to conclude that what has been ignored in efforts to understand him is the “decolonial time” that the work reflects.
The author examines how Jaar has been identifying and critiquing coloniality throughout his life but that, as with the decolonial itself, his oeuvre as a result is fundamentally incomplete—what she calls the “aesthetics of the unfinished through the concepts of mourning, accountability, and failure.”
This makes a lot of sense, because we find ourselves today, more than 50 years after Pinochet first gave us a taste of the neoliberal future, still struggling against it and its very contemporary pathologies.
And the thread that ties today’s politics, Pinochet and the longer historical experience of societies such as Chile, is capitalism, the origins of which can be traced to the violent conquest of the Americas and the dispossession that ensued.
Referencing Jaar’s work “1992” in New York—an advertising billboard showing the barbed-wire entrance of a detention centre for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong—San Martín argues that this enunciates three statements about his art and thinking.
First, it places the origins of capitalism in the conquest of 1492 and the global expansion five hundred years later of its current phase—neoliberalism.
Second, it asserts the continuity of a colonial binary logic of life under free-market rule—conqueror and conquered, civilised and barbaric, saviour settler and backward ignorant, developed and underdeveloped, nationalist and terrorist, citizen and refugee, human and alien.
And third, it is an assertion of Jaar’s main aim as an artist: to make visible the catastrophic consequences of colonialism not only in the Americas but elsewhere in the world, not least Southeast Asia.
Based on 10 years of archival research, interviews with Jaar and his contemporaries, and the analysis of important but also lesser-known works, San Martín undertakes a comprehensive survey of an artist whose ideas seem more relevant today than ever.
Jaar’s 2016 “I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On” for example, using neon to repeat the famous statement from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable, was created in response to Donald Trump’s election as president.
Beckett’s phrase was inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who while witnessing the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascism defined himself as intellectually pessimistic yet optimistic in will.
San Martín writes: “A fervent reader of Gramsci, Jaar identifies with this mode of lamenting and creating, revealing that while coloniality punishes social change, it cannot paralyse the struggles for liberation. It cannot paralyse hope.”
Perhaps more importantly, the book gives what we today call Latin America its rightful place as the historically central locus of modernity and colonialism, deferring to the thought of the key architects of “coloniality” such as Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein.
The author writes: “Standing against modernity’s progressive time and its machine of denigration and oblivion, Quijano explains, ‘Vivimos adentro, pero en contra’ (We live inside it, but against it).
“Jaar’s art represents that living inside and against from the perspective of decolonial time, critiquing what Quijano calls ‘coloniality of power’ or the world as it is.”
Above all, it positions his art, and art in general, as a critically important cultural vector of resistance that never forgets and knows no end, something San Martín captures in another quote from Beckett from Worstward Ho (1983): “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
San Martín concludes by recounting her encounter with German war crimes prosecutor Wolfgang Kaleck who collaborated with Jaar in 2012 when they printed the phrase “Arrest Kissinger!” in three major Berlin newspapers.
Coming so long after Kissinger’s war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor, she argues that among other things this precedent means hope, for instance, for the detention of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in November 2024.
She was in Berlin to see one of Jaar’s most recent works, “The End of the World” (2024), addressing our planetary crisis in the age of digital totalisation. It is less a statement than a provocative question, and one that asks whose world, or which world, is ending, and whose world, or which world, comes next?
The author writes: “ In the collapse of politics and society, where plate tectonics and technologies are shifting within the paradigm of modernity, at stake is a radical fight for justice that acknowledges the likelihood of its own failure, as Jaar does in his project on decolonial time.
“Both ‘The End of the World’ and Jaar’s art practice overall are about that fight and its continuity—even though, or perhaps precisely because, they present themselves to us as the end of the world.”
Please help the Latin American Review of Books: you can subscribe on Substack, make a donation through Stripe . . . or just buy us a coffee
BUY THIS BOOK: UK/Europe
Categories: Chile