Artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar uses photography, sculpture, and film to consistently provoke, question, and search for ways to heighten our consciousness about issues often forgotten or suppressed in the international sphere, while not relinquishing art’s formal and aesthetic power. Over his career, Jaar has explored political and social issues including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between developing and industrialized nations. In 2019, the artist was awarded the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize for his contributions throughout his career to peace construction. An ongoing exhibition Alfredo Jaar: The Structure of Images, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through July 3, 2022.

One of the most urgent and critical art writers working today, David Levi Strauss’s work focuses on the intersection between image and text, and the third space that is created through that interaction. He is the author of Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture, 2012), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (Aperture, 2014), and other books. His latest work is Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020) exposing a new ‘iconopolitics’ in which words and images lose their connection to reality.⁠