Alfredo Jaar: The Power of Words

Alfredo Jaar's The Power of Words (1984/2021) is a seminal, programmatic work reveals how, at the age of twenty-eight, the artist was already confronting the political stakes of images. The installation introduces themes central to his practice: the ethics of representation, the tension between words and images, and the viewer’s responsibility in the act of seeing. Created soon after Jaar’s arrival in New York in the early 1980s, the work centers on a photograph of a typewriter whose paper and roller have been removed. Through the empty opening, sixteen press photographs of anonymous figures in moments of crisis are projected. By removing the mechanism of writing, Jaar underscores the limits of language and confronts viewers with the ambiguity and ethical weight of images in a media-saturated world. It was presented in 2026 in Unlimited—Art Basel’s sector for monumental installations, curated by Ruba Katrib—jointly by Jean-Kenta Gauthier, Goodman Gallery, Galerie Lelong, Lia Rumma, and Galerie Thomas Schulte.

This catalogue features a previously unpublished essay by philosopher Jacques Rancière and a conversation between Alfredo Jaar and Rancière, alongside images of Jaar's installation The Power of Words.