Alfredo Jaar makes art from the news
His latest video adapts footage of coronavirus burials on Hart Island off the Bronx
LIKE MUCH of his art, “Between the Heavens and Me”, Alfredo Jaar’s most recent video, was drawn not from his imagination but from the news. In this case it began with a report on the BBC about Hart Island off the Bronx. The prison detail at the island’s cemetery—where, for decades, indigent New Yorkers were interred in mass graves—was working round the clock to bury the unclaimed bodies of those who had died, alone and unloved, with covid-19. “My brain could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing,” Mr Jaar says.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Opening the black box”
From the June 20th 2020 edition
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