Alfredo Jaar's 'Shadows' Exhibition Confronts Nicaragua's Forgotten Civil War Through Koen Wessing's Photographs

Alfredo Jaar's exhibition 'Shadows' at Galerie Lelong in New York from February 14 to March 28, 2015, presents four 1978 photographs by documentarian Koen Wessing depicting the Nicaraguan Civil War's brutality. The show centers on images of two young women grieving their father, a campesino executed by the Samoza regime, whose body was dumped by a rural road. Wessing's black-and-white transparencies, displayed as 12-by-13-inch lightboxes in a darkened corridor, show the man's head wound and the violent intimidation at military checkpoints. A large installation projects the daughters' wailing image onto an aluminum-paneled wall, with cutouts that transform them into blazing white silhouettes before fading into darkness. The Nicaraguan Civil War, spanning about 30 years, involved U.S. support for the Contras under the Reagan administration, leading to up to 50,000 deaths, including many civilians. The conflict saw systematic attacks on civilians using torture, assassination, terrorism, and rape, with tactics taught at the U.S.-funded School of the Americas. In 1986, the Iran-Contra affair revealed illegal arms sales and money laundering by U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Oliver North to fund the Contras. Jaar's work often uses documentary images to highlight overlooked tragedies, such as the Rwandan Genocide and withheld photos from the Iraq and Afghan wars, collaborating with critic David Levi Strauss in 2009 to describe censored atrocities.