Alfredo Jaar’s Angel depicts a boy against an expansive urban backdrop in Luanda, Angola’s capital city. What I find striking is Jaar’s visual strategies to call attention to larger social and political issues. For instance, a bright orange marking on the boy’s white shirt deliberately swirls upward—a hand-painted ‘swoosh’ form that evokes Nike’s iconic logo and suggests economic challenges and aspirations in contemporary Luanda. Jaar’s focus on site-specific work has addressed political topics and social issues in various contexts, as he has worked on projects internationally, spanning from Angola and Rwanda to Brazil and Hong Kong.

Jaar’s transformation to the spatial dimensions of Luanda is also compelling. Angel is a c-type photographic print that forms a long, horizontal work of three connected segments. The boy’s pose cuts across the city skyline, his arm extended to point at something in front of him. When I first looked at this work, I viewed the image as presenting one continuous horizon line of an urban area with the color tones adjusted in each panel from darker to lighter tones. But upon closer looking, I realized that the triptych format actually repeats the same skyline three times. This effect exaggerates the size of Luanda to extend the city’s reach outward, making it appear much larger.

Jaar’s Angel is currently on view at the Museum until November 10 in the exhibition Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts, which presents a diverse range of contemporary artworks made across the globe since 1970. The placement of Jaar’s work with other international artists in the thematic section of Art Purposes focused on ‘making’ prompts viewers to explore connections across Jaar’s projects. Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile in 1956, and works in a variety of media—photography, film, performance, and installation. Angel draws attention to the intersection between this work and Jaar’s other projects, as well as his background in architecture. Photography is part of his research process for filmmaking, including his film Muxima (2005) set in Luanda, where he met the boy featured in Angel.

Allison J. Martino
Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow