Art Basel Unlimited

 Presented at Art Basel Unlimited, The Power of Words by Alfredo Jaar is a seminal, programmatic work that reveals how, at the age of 28, the artist was already confronting the political stakes of images. The installation introduces themes that are 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, 16 press photographs of anonymous figures in moments of crisis gleaned by the artist from newspapers are projected, while the red glow that floods the space and spills onto each image in the work serves as a warning.

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.