Alfredo Jaar & Florencia San Martín | Conversation & Book Signing

12 September 2026 
  • Register for the event here Galerie Lelong, New York, is pleased to host a conversation between artist Alfredo Jaar and...

    Register for the event here

    Galerie Lelong, New York, is pleased to host a conversation between artist Alfredo Jaar and scholar Florencia San Martín in celebration of the release of San Martín's latest volume, Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished.

    Join us in the gallery on Saturday, September 12 at 3pm for a live discussion between Jaar and San Martín followed by a book signing. Select quanities of the book will be available for purchase at the gallery. 

    About the Book

    In Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished, Florencia San Martín analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity that obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. San Martín argues that Jaar’s work represents decolonial time, exposing the limits of the violent systems we inhabit. His art, she maintains, is informed by and responds to two interconnected historical events relevant to his own life: the US-backed military coup that established Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile and the implementation around the world of the corollary neoliberal economic system. San Martín explores the key themes in Jaar’s artistic practice—mourning, accountability, and failure—which situates the victims of the Chilean regime in a global context, directly confronts the architects of atrocity, and questions how ideas of diversity and inclusion have been co-opted by modern neoliberal discourses. Alfredo Jaar enables us to reimagine art history, offering a fresh paradigm with which to think about global contemporary art.

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  • About the Speakers

    Artist Alfredo Jaar

    Alfredo Jaar. Portrait by Andrea Rego Barros.

    Alfredo Jaar is an innovative artist, architect, and filmmaker. For over 40 years, Jaar has used photographs, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex socio-political issues and the limits and ethics of representation. By using a hybrid form of art-making, Jaar has consistently provoked, questioned, and searched for ways to heighten our consciousness about issues often forgotten or suppressed in the international sphere, while not relinquishing art’s formal and aesthetic power. Over his career, Jaar has explored significant political and social issues including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between developing and industrialized nations.

  • Florencia San Martín is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehigh University. She is the author of Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial...

    Florencia San Martín.

    Florencia San Martín is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehigh University. She is the author of Alfredo Jaar: Decolonial Time and the Aesthetics of the Unfinished (Duke University Press, 2026) and co-editor of the volumes The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (Routledge, 2024) and Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile (Amherst College Press, 2023). She is also the editor of Todavía somos el tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe (2025), the catalog accompanying the homonymous exhibition she co-curated in 2023, commissioned by the Chilean Ministry of Cultures. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the College Art Association.

     

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