Prints & Multiples
24 framed pigment prints, framed matrix print, framed collage, video
For over more than 30 years, Alfredo Jaar has travelled to places of conflict to witness events and document them first hand. In 1991, Jaar visited detention camps for Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum in Hong Kong from both economic and political hardship. This trip and subsequent ones formed a body of work titled ‘The Hong Kong Project.’ A Hundred Times Nguyen is from this series and employs four slightly varying images of Nguyen Thi Thuy, a young refugee born in a camp. In a media landscape saturated with images that bombard us without mercy, Jaar hopes that the concentration on one little girl can communicate a larger story. He notes: ‘The capacity of humanity resides in our ability to read an image and identify with another human being. Only in that capacity of focusing is where the process of empathy and identification can occur.’ The work, composed of multiple pigment prints and video, focuses on an individual who is emblematic of that crisis, and can be understood as symbolic of refugees everywhere.
