One Million Points of Light: Alfredo Jaar at Galeria Francisco Fino

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DATE

15 Sep 2026

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

One Million Points of Light: Alfredo Jaar at Galeria Francisco Fino

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

One Million Points of Light at Galeria Francisco Fino presents three important projects by the Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar. Although it comprises only a few pieces, the exhibition feels notably comprehensive, bringing together key ideas the artist has explored across his practice. For those unfamiliar with his body of work, the show, which is also Jaar’s first solo gallery exhibition in Lisbon, might offer an informative entry point, while for others it could serve as a rewarding return to the artist’s central concerns: politics, images, and responsibility.

The exhibition opens with Alfredo Jaar’s seminal project The Sound of Silence (2006). Upon entering the gallery space, a visitor is immediately confronted with a massive wall of white, fluorescent light, so bright that it is hard to look at directly. As one’s eyesight adjusts, the structure behind the light becomes visible, appearing as a minimalist metal-covered black box. When the cross at the entrance to the black box turns green, a visitor may go inside, where she is invited to watch an eight-minute slideshow narrating two intertwined stories. One is that of photojournalist Kevin Carter and the other is that of a photograph depicting an emaciated child and a vulture, taken while Carter was documenting famine in Sudan. The image earned the photographer a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and also became the subject of fierce public controversy that may have contributed to the circumstances surrounding his suicide later that year.

Images, particularly photographic ones, are a major subject in Alfredo Jaar’s practice, while his methodological affiliation lies in the field of semantics. In an interview with Apollo magazine, he explained: ‘I respect photography enormously, but I’m more concerned with what I call the politics of images. I’m interested in deconstructing photography and the way it influences us in the world.’ According to Jaar, images always carry certain conceptions of the world or, in other words, are never ‘innocent’ and should therefore always be ‘read’ rather than observed. His approach to the politics of images seems to offer tools for such a reading, as it asks what infrastructures underlie an image and who might be responsible for the meaning it generates.

In the story behind The Sound of Silence, Carter’s photograph, its publication in The New York Times, and the public outrage it provoked became inseparable, with Carter himself being called a vulture for prioritising the photograph over helping the child. Jaar, however, points to a broader network of implication, reminding us of the very conditions of the world that made such an image possible. As he put it in a conversation published by The Brooklyn Rail, ‘...it is too easy to blame Carter for being the vulture, when in fact we are the vultures, the vulture is us. We are the ones who are guilty of such criminal, barbaric indifference.’

The second project featured in the exhibition – You Do Not Take a Photograph. You Make It (2013) – more directly exposes those behind the camera, which today could mean practically everyone. The work’s title is a quotation from photographer Ansel Adams. The same quote appears in bold letters on a large black-and-white lightbox. In commenting on the project, Jaar said that with this piece he wanted to problematise the ‘irresponsible’ overproduction of images and the casualness with which they are handled in the oversaturated visual field of social media. The phrase, stressing the shift from “take” to “make”, again indicates a key concept for the artist: images are not mere depictions but bring certain ideas into the world, for which their makers therefore bear responsibility. The lightbox is accompanied by a stack of posters with the same text, which visitors are invited to take with them – a gesture that can be read as either a playful test of consumption habits or an opportunity to keep a useful reminder.

The third and final project in the exhibition, One Million Points of Light (2005), shows a photograph of a shimmering water surface projected onto a wall. At first glance, the image seems merely a pretty picture, but a visitor already familiar with Jaar’s methods would understandably approach it with suspicion.

For the late curator Okwui Enwezor, what underpins Alfredo Jaar’s practice, both materially and conceptually, is the notion of illumination. Indeed, many of the artist’s projects, including those presented at Francisco Fino, employ various lighting devices, such as light tables, projections, flashes, light boxes, and fluorescent lamps. However, what is it that Alfredo Jaar’s practice seeks to illuminate through them? Often, his lights are blinding. The Sound of Silence (2006) not only greets the visitor with a wall of light but also surprises her with a bright flash directed at her eyes in the final sequence of the slideshow, immediately after Carter’s photograph is shown. Enwezor observes that at this very moment ‘vision is called into question’¹, referring to a physical reaction as well as to reflection on how what we see affects our judgement. As he argues, at a time when technology enables near-infinite possibilities in the production, circulation, and manipulation of images, absence can signify more than presence and, to build on Enwezor’s argument, silence can be louder than sound. It is within this tension that Alfredo Jaar’s projects stand.

The photograph in One Million Points of Light appears blinding in its tranquillity as its meaning opens up through the text printed on a postcard version of the image in the corner of the room. The text reads: This photograph was taken in Luanda, Angola, pointing the lens of my camera across the Atlantic Ocean towards Brazil. In 1580, Angola, a Portuguese colony, started shipping African slaves to Brazil. The Portuguese Colonial Empire (1415–1999) was the longest-lasting of all European colonial empires. At least 11 million Africans were taken across the Middle Passage of the Atlantic to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies. It is estimated that more than three and a half million souls were shipped directly from Angola to Brazil. Today, an estimated 55 percent of the Brazilian population, approximately 113 million people, is still of direct or partial African descent.

The postcards are also there for visitors to keep.

It comes as no surprise that the works in the exhibition at Francisco Fino have been extensively covered and interpreted, including by the artist himself. So, as I was working on this text, a question lingered: ‘What is there to add?’ My impulse was to join the exhibition’s curator, Maurizio Bortolotti, in considering where we stand today, years after Jaar completed these projects, in relation to the questions they pose to us. While Bortolotti rightly stresses their relevance in the age of social media, I cannot help but extend this reflection to the latest technological development in image-making – the use of AI. With the growing capacity of AI to create images that simulate or alter reality, the ability to understand the “presumption of non-innocence” within representation and image-reading skills becomes particularly significant.

Many conversations about the future impact of AI can seem paralysing in their gloom, so it might be productive to end this text with another quote by Alfredo Jaar. When asked by Musée magazine in 2014 what impact he wanted his works to have, he replied: ‘I hope to offer a little hope in a time of despair. But it is difficult. I remain a Gramscian: I am a pessimist with my intellect, but an optimist with my will.’ It is perhaps a human responsibility, then, to hold on to optimism even in the hardest of times and to work towards giving that optimism material form.

The exhibition is open until September 26, 2026.

¹Okwui Enwezor, “Alfredo Jaar: The Sound of Silence,” in Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks (London: Phaidon, 2011).

BIOGRAPHY

Katya Savchenko is a curator, professor, and cultural producer based in Moscow, Russia. She graduated from the Moscow Higher School of Economics in 2011 and completed her Master's degree in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths University in London in 2014. Currently, she works as a junior research curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Along with Valentin Diaconov, she is a mentor for the Garage 2021/2022 scholarship program, supporting emerging artists. Katya Savchenko is also the coordinator and professor of Arts Management in the Master's program in Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Art at the Moscow Higher School of Economics. In 2014-2015, she was head of production for the 6th Moscow International Biennial of Contemporary Art, How to Gather, curated by Bart de Baere, Defne Ayas, and Nicolaus Schafhausen. In 2017, she was an award-winning artist-in-residence at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, as part of the EUNIC program supporting emerging Russian curators. Katya Savchenko has also collaborated as an independent curator with the Osnova Gallery in Moscow and the Futuro Gallery in Nizhny Novgorod.

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