images fill us with an illusion of presence, which corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun. I
later leaves us with a sense of absence, why not try remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita».
the opposite? […] People were already shown a great
In an adjacent space, a large heap of thousands
quantity of images, but they did not see anything. No and thousands of slides all contain the same image:
one saw anything because no one did anything. Then a close-up of Gutete Emerita’s staring eyes. The
I thought, this time I won’t show the images so that work is moving not only because of its physicality,
people can ‘see’ them better » (Jaar, Gallo, 1997, which alludes to the million victims of the genocide,
p. 59). This approach is particularly clear in of the but also because it evokes all the survivors of the
project’s installations, Real Pictures (1995), in which tragedy, giving value to their history rather than
a number of black filing cabinets containing images merely representing it (limited here to recording her
of the genocide are placed around the exhibition stare but preserving her anonymity). At the same,
space. The observer can see the description of the observer connects with the image in a brutal
the images on the outside of the cabinets but the way.
photographs are kept hidden. One of the descriptions
The above works are just a few examples of
reads: «Benjamin looks directly into the camera, projects that, through art, manage to ask questions
as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be about such issues as the transmission of history and
photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove the testimony of its survivors. At the same time,
to his friends in Kampala, Uganda that the atrocities their photographic discourse proposes alternative
were real and that he had seen the aftermath». forms of representation that break away from the
In this way, the installation becomes a space
that evokes what is invisible to the eyes, while the
traditional conventions associated with memory,
history and documents.
very structure envelops the observer in a kind of
memorial. «The theatrical staging here with its
resplendent light functions both as a memorial
to the victims of the Rwandan genocide as well
as a conduit or means to persuade and sustain
consideration of this brutal event» (Bricker, 1999, p. 25).
Another large-scale installation that forms part
of Rwanda is The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996),
consisting of a long passage of text introducing
the observer to the context of the genocide, before
continuing with the following testimony: «On
Sunday morning at a church in Ntarama, 400 Tutsi
men, women and children were slaughtered by a
Hutu death squad. Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, was
References
Bricker Balken, D (1999) Alfredo Jaar: Lament of the Images. List Visual Art
Center, MIT: Boston.
Jaar, A. & Gallo, Ruben (1997) “The limits of representation” in Trans vol.
1/2, Issue 3/4.
Hirsch, M (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory,
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Van Alphen, E. (1997) Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary
Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Young, J. E. (2000) At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
attending mass with her family when the massacre
began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes
were her husband Tito Kahinamura, 40, and her
two sons, Muhoza, 10, and Matirigari, 7. Somehow,
Gutete managed to escape with her daughter Marie-
Louise Unumararunga, 12. They hid in a nearby
swamp for three weeks, coming out only at night in
search of food. Gutete has returned to the church in
the woods because she has nowhere else to go. When
she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to
overview
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