If you go down to the woods today...Alfredo Jaar's sites of resistance

This essay examines the work of Alfredo Jaar, ’The Garden of Good and Evil’, permanently installed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2019. Referencing the secretive ‘Black Sites’, the network of global imprisonment centres established by the Bush administration post-9/11, I argue that Jaar’s nine-part installation engages with ethical and political issues of the mis-use of power and the role of the artist as witness to this abuse. Reflecting upon Jaar’s projects from the 1990s to the present, I argue that his site-specific practice represents a visual politics of aesthetic resistance and that the locating of this work in the grounds of an 18th Century estate, Bretton Hall, invokes the history of land art in both America and the UK and the complex meanings of landscape in the narratives of national identity.

Alfredo Jaar: The Garden of Good and Evil [Exhibition Catalogue]: This new publication documents Alfredo Jaar's remarkable work, The Garden of Good and Evil. Originally commissioned as a central part of Jaar’s 2017 exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, its new iteration sees the nine steel cells permanently installed in the landscape within an established woodland adjacent to the lake, with one sited in its waters.