Alfredo Jaar The End
The End (GSL_a), 2025
The End (GSL_b), 2025
The End (GSL_c), 2025
The End (GSL_d), 2025
The End (GSL_e), 2025
The End (GSL_f), 2025
The End (GSL_g), 2025
The End (GSL_h), 2025
The End (GSL_i), 2025
The End (GSL_j), 2025
Artist's statement
The End focuses on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Scientists have described the situation there as an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’. The lake is a keystone ecosystem in the western hemisphere but is being destroyed by excessive water extraction. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area since the mid-nineteenth century, exposing toxic dust and driving salinity to dangerous levels.
Saline lake loss triggers a long-term cycle of environmental, health and economic suffering and without a dramatic increase in water flow, the Great Salt Lake risks disappearing altogether, causing immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment and economy.
The lake and its wetlands provide minerals for Utah’s industries and sustain thousands of local jobs, supporting $2.5 billion in direct economic activity yearly. It also increases rainfall and sustains 80% of Utah’s wetlands, providing a habitat for ten million migratory birds.
Many observers believe this unfolding disaster is past the point of no return. As the lake disappears, the resulting dust blows around, loaded with toxic particles. One of the great bird migratory routes of North America may well vanish. The situation was described to Jaar on a visit to Salt Lake City: “What used to be a thriving mecca for shore birds is now littered with the dried corpses of thousands of birds on the cracked mud flats that used to be the lake.”
The loss of the lake would be a tragedy of incalculable magnitude and a sign of things to come. Jaar’s objective for these photographs is to show the tragic fate of the lake and simultaneously reveal its extraordinary beauty and potential. In spite of the dire situation we are in, he wanted to create images of great beauty and sadness. In the face of the magnitude of this tragedy, Jaar decided to print these images in a small, unspectacular format, as a kind of visual whisper, a lament for our dying planet.
All artwork courtesy of the artist.
About the photographer
Born Santiago, Chile, 1956
Chilean
New York, United States
About Alfredo Jaar
Jaar is an artist, architect, photographer and filmmaker whose work documenting humanity’s impact on the planet has included, in addition to The End, the series Hiroshima, Hiroshima (2023) and The End of the World (2024), which addresses the effects of uncontrolled and unethical global extractivism.
Jaar has participated in the Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009 and 2013) and the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1987, 1989, 2010 and 2021), as well as Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1987 and 2002).
Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2007); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie und Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, all in Berlin (2012); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2013); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom (2017); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2020); SESC Pompeía, São Paulo (2021); and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2023).
Jaar has received numerous awards including the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in Sweden in 2020. In 2024, he was awarded the IV Mediterranean Albert Camus Prize in Spain and this year he has won the Edward MacDowell Medal in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
His work can be found in dozens of public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000, both in the United States.
Jaar has executed more than seventy public artworks around the world and over eighty monographs of his work have been published.
Shortlist
Takashi Arai, Exposed in a Hundred Suns, 2011– ongoing
Marina Caneve, Are They Rocks or Clouds?, 2015–19
Tom Fecht, Luciferines — entre chien et loup (Luciferines — Between Dog and Wolf), 2015–25
Balazs Gardi, The Storm, 2020–21
Roberto Huarcaya, Amazogramas, 2014
Alfredo Jaar, The End, 2025
Belal Khaled, Hands Tell Stories, 2023–24
Hannah Modigh, Hurricane Season, 2012–16
Baudouin Mouanda, Ciel de saison (Seasonal Sky), 2020
Camille Seaman, The Big Cloud, 2008–14
Laetitia Vançon, Tribute to Odesa, 2022
Patrizia Zelano, Acqua Alta a Venezia (High Water in Venice), 2019