Alfredo Jaar Wins the Hiroshima Art Prize

The city of Hiroshima selected Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar as the winner of the 11th edition of the Hiroshima Art Prize. The Hiroshima Art Prize is an award that has been granted every three years by the city of Hiroshima since 1989, in recognition of achievements by artists who have contributed to the peace of humanity in the field of contemporary art and the spread of the "Spirit of Hiroshima" to achieve everlasting world peace. Past winners of the Prize include: Issey Miyake, Robert Rauschenberg, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Daniel Libeskind, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo Qiang, Yoko Ono, Doris Salcedo, and Mona Hatoum. The decision to select Alfredo Jaar as the winner of this year's edition of the event took into consideration his 1995 participation in the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing memorial exhibition titled "After Hiroshima," organized by the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. The original works created by Jaar on that occasion delved deeply into Hiroshima. Additionally, in recent years he has demonstrated a keen interest in the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear incident in Fukushima. In Chile, he has presented several actions centered on the dictatorship and human rights violations in his homeland. A work permanently exhibited at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, is his piece titled La geometría de la conciencia (Geometry of Conscience, 2010), in which viewers enter an enclosed dark space where 500 silhouettes commemorate the faces of people detained and disappeared. Jaar was chosen as the 2018 winner of the event because of the expectation that the commemorative exhibition will have a profound message and will showcase new works that conceptualize Hiroshima as a contemporary theme. About the award, Jaar made the following official statement: "I am extremely honored to accept the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize. I feel enormously privileged but also deeply humbled by this responsibility. In these dark times, the "spirit of Hiroshima" is more necessary than ever. As Sadako Kurihara suggested in her magnificent poem Umashimenkana, I must try, and I will try to "bring forth new life." Preparations for the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize Commemorative Exhibition will be ongoing during 2018 and 2019. It will be inaugurated during summer-fall of 2020. Both the exhibition and the award ceremony will be held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, during 2020.