Alfredo Jaar and the work series on a dying lake

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Work Series & Retrospective Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: August 22, 2026 · Last checked: August 22, 2026, 2:50 PM

Alfredo Jaar has built a practice that turns political emergencies into precise visual structures. In the recent work group The End, he uses small-format photographs to track the rapid shrinkage of Utah's Great Salt Lake as a slow-motion catastrophe.

The series The End in Utah

At the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, the exhibition Alfredo Jaar: The End brings together images of the lake's receding shoreline and its exposed lakebed. The museum describes water loss figures of 73 percent in volume and 60 percent in surface area since the mid-19th century.

Jaar prints the photographs at roughly 11.4 by 14 inches and describes the format as a 'visual whisper', a deliberate refusal of spectacle. The series responds to local descriptions of the Great Salt Lake as an 'environmental nuclear bomb', referring to airborne dust laced with arsenic, lead and mercury.

Retrospective lens on environmental work

The End extends a decades-long line in Jaar's practice that ties landscape imagery to structural violence. Earlier public interventions and installations interrogated resource extraction, migration and media images of conflict; the Great Salt Lake photographs add a precise climate dimension to this arc.

Critics have connected the series to his broader interest in how images circulate and when they fail to trigger political response. In reviews of the Prix Pictet cycle themed 'Storm', writers note how the modest scale of the salted landscapes amplifies their sense of accumulated threat rather than offering grand catastrophe tableaux.

The immersive projection Inferno & Paradiso

At Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Jaar's project Inferno & Paradiso reshapes press photography into a timed projection environment. Forty photographs by twenty photojournalists are presented in cycles of twenty minutes, first images associated with 'heaven', then those marked as 'hell'.

The institution describes the installation as a test for whether photography still carries weight in an image-saturated world. Viewers are held inside alternating blocks of joy and crisis, ranging from Ukraine to Gaza and New York, forcing attention on how visual narratives of suffering and happiness are sequenced.

Series, formats and long arcs

Across both The End and Inferno & Paradiso, Jaar structures time as carefully as image. In Utah he slows looking through small prints and detailed captions about salinity and toxicity; in Lausanne he uses fixed twenty-minute cycles where visitors are immersed in one affective register before confronting its opposite.

These projects echo earlier bodies of work that turned statistics and testimonies into spatial experiences rather than simple illustrations. By placing climate metrics and conflict reportage in formats that demand sustained attention, he keeps the focus on responsibility for political choices, not only on spectacle.

How the artist works

Alfredo Jaar trained as an architect and works across installation, photography, film and public interventions. His projects often start from research on a specific crisis, then condense that material into pared-down spatial arrangements where text, light and image carry equal weight.

Where the artist stands now

Alfredo Jaar continues to develop work groups like The End and Inferno & Paradiso, building on a practice that links environmental data and press imagery to questions of ethics and political responsibility.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.