Milan, 1946: Lucio Fontana visits his studio on his return from Argentina, 2013

For more than thirty years, Alfredo Jaar has pondered the social responsibility of art in a global context marked by injustice, humanitarian crises and political oppression. With multi-faceted projects that embrace installation, performance, video, photography and incursions into the public space, he deploys as ‘aesthetic of resistance’ – from the title of a 1992 work – which has no fear of taking a stand before the most pressing issues of contemporary history. This is deeply rooted in his experience as an artist who trained in the Chile of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, and debuted just after the coup in 1973 with a series of works in which criticism of the regime is clear but carried out with very subtle strategies. [...]