The Apocalypse by Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, photographer and film director born in Chile and who has been living in New York for a long time. He is best known as an artist of large installations often dedicated to major social and political issues and to war. This exhibition in Tokyo is divided into three apocalyptic moments evoked right from the title - The End³. At the center of the scene is an installation created in collaboration with the photographer Daido Moriyama: a large darkroom illuminated by the classic red light which houses a selection of Moriyama's famous photographs from the 1972 project Bye Bye Photography. Rough and blurry photos of urban life in Tokyo, which for Jaar evoke the theme of the end of photography. The other two moments of the exhibition are even more dramatic if possible. Silent Flash is a three-metre-long installation showing a sequence of aerial views of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the only remaining building near the epicenter of the atomic bombing. The theme here is the end of humanity. The definitive closure of this dramatic show is the latest installation which is rightly titled The End of the World. In it, the artist criticizes current economic policies with respect to the necessary raw materials - copper, lithium and rare earths - for a transition towards new sustainable goals, underlining how the unbridled use of scarce mineral resources continues to trigger and fuel political and social crises.