Rwanda, Rwanda: Alfredo Jaar on the Rwandan Genocide

Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda, Rwanda calls attention to the Rwandan Genocide as a part of his larger work The Rwanda Project. Installed on commission in Malmö, Sweden in 1994, this bold lettering and repetition printed through photolithography and displayed as light boxes works to collapse the geopolitical distance between Rwanda and Sweden. In August 1994, Jaar visited Rwanda in the aftermath of one of the most tragic ethnic conflicts of recent history. In the months before Jaar’s visit, an estimated 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered over the course of 100 days by ethnic Hutu extremists. Overwhelmed by his experience in Rwanda, Jaar let out a cry of grief for the Rwandan people that condemned the failure of the international community. Rwanda, Rwanda is a piece that serves and “functions as a call: a visual declaration, naming but also shouting out this to the passing public, and invocation to remember, to engage, to pay attention” (Pollock, “The Visual Politics of Rwanda”). 

On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying President Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down at Kigali Airport. This plane crash marked the beginning of the organized killing of an estimated 800,000 people over the course of around 100 days. The genocide was politically organized by Hutu extremists and systematically carried out by the militant group, the Interahamwe. The ethnic group marked for massacre were the Rwandan Tutsi. Belgian colonial rule had left Rwanda ripe with conflict and violence… “Identity cards which stated the bearer’s ethnicity—a legacy of Belgian colonial rule—became passports to life or death” (Cieplak, Death, Image, Memory). The killings were intimately experienced by thousands, while millions watched from a distance. The failure of the international community and the “institutional abandonment of Rwanda” by the United Nations is an important piece of this story (Cieplak, Death, Image, Memory). The Rwandan Genocide was brought to an end by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. The violence did not end there. In spite of this stained history, Rwanda has taken incredible steps towards restoration and peace over the past two decades (UN Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide). 

In 1994, Alfredo Jaar witnessed the indescribable aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide and after months of contemplation, choose to stand in solidarity with the Rwandan people. Jaar determined that critical memorialization of the Rwandan Genocide is priceless. Jaar’s intention is to bring a visibility to the Rwandan Genocide, a visibility that does not “add to the pornography of violence that surrounds us” (Jaar, “Hear from Alfredo Jaar”). This is no easy task.

Jaar grapples with distinguishing between what is accessible to the public and what is representable. When working in political resistance to the United Nations, an organization that was in 1994 functionally controlled by empires once driven by colonization, Jaar realizes the “(un)representability” of racialized trauma (Chakravorty, “Unwatchable: Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images (2002), and the Ends of Representation”). The histories of colonial violence and their “afterlives” shed light on the realities of Belgian colonial rule. Prior to the colonial era, Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa lived in relative harmony; intermarriage and the crossing of ethnic groups was not uncommon. Belgian colonial rule introduced identification cards and actively oppressed the Hutus in favor and privilege of the Tutsi minority (UN Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide). It was colonization that focused on race and heightened and built ethnic tensions that defined Rwanda’s independence in 1962 and the years of ethnic violence that followed. The Rwandan Genocide “was not a spontaneous, random outbreak of decontextualized violence” (Cieplak, Death, Image, Memory). With or without this history, the eyes of “civilized” Europe needed to be reminded of catastrophe elsewhere. Rwanda, Rwanda serves as an ‘accusatory reminder of the failure of civilized Europe to intervene” (Chakravorty, “Unwatchable: Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images (2002), and the Ends of Representation”).

Jaar largely attributes the failure of the international community to the “white gaze” of the United Nations and its mediation of racialized violence as rendered spectacular through aesthetic means (see Newsweek cover page in images)... 

"In our world of instant televised horror, it can become easy to see a black body in almost abstract terms, as part of the huge smudge of eternally miserable blackness that has loomed in and out of the public mind through the decades: Biafra in the sixties; Uganda in the seventies; Ethiopia in the eighties; and now Rwanda in the nineties" (Strauss, “A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar”).

The reluctance to intervene in a distant country where news images “of suffering and misery in the world are used as a reminder of what we are free from” defined the palliative response of the international community (Strauss, “A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar”). 

The Rwandan Genocide was a tragedy that is beyond worthy of memorialization and deep reflection...

 Alfredo Jaar: "In a way, the question is: are we allowed as artists to create art out of suffering? Or should we let these tragedies sink into invisibility? Why can't I resist their invisibility in the media and offer my own reading, my own image, my own outrage, my own accusations about this tragic situation? To create these works is not only to put Rwanda on the map but is also a modest way to express solidarity, to create, as I did, a memorial for the victims of genocide in Rwanda. Now, how many gestures of solidarity have you seen? How many memorials to Rwanda have you seen? This is a memorial for one million people. What is this worth?" (Phillips and Jaar, “The Aesthetics of Witnessing: A Conversation with Alfredo Jaar”).

Disclaimer: This Clio entry is in no way an attempt to look at the Rwandan Genocide through the lens of historical objectivity. Alfredo Jaar and many others make clear that the experience of the enormously complex tragedy of the Rwandan Genocide is inexpressable. However, it is still important to take this history into account for those who are unfamiliar with it and make clear its relevance to the functioning of our international communities today.

Chakravorty, Swagato. “Unwatchable: Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images (2002), and the Ends of Representation.” Art Journal 80, no. 3 (2021): 100-116. Accessed January 26, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2021.1920290.

Cieplak, Piotr. Death, Image, Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and its Aftermath in Photography and Documentation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Jaar, Alfredo. “Hear from Alfredo Jaar.” MFABoston. Accessed March 31, 2023. https://www.mfa.org/video/hear-from-alfredo-jaar.

Phillips, Patricia C., and Alfredo Jaar. “The Aesthetics of Witnessing: A Conversation with Alfredo Jaar.” Art Journal 64, no. 3 (2005): 6–27. Accessed January 26, 2023.  https://doi.org/10.2307/20068397.

Pollock, Griselda. “The Visual Politics of Rwanda.” The I.B. Tauris Blog. April 29, 2014. https://theibtaurisblog.com/2014/04/29/the-visual-politics-of-rwanda/.

Strauss, David Levi. “A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar.” AlfredoJaar, The Rwanda Project. Accessed January 26, 2023. https://alfredojaar.net/projects/2019/the-rwanda-project/a-sea-of-griefs-is-not-a-proscenium-on-the-rwanda-projects-of-alfredo-jaar/.

“United Nations Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations.” United Nations. Accessed March 31, 2023. https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml.