SAINT-GILLES.- La Patinoire Royale Bach is presenting La Fin du Monde, the first exhibition by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar at the gallery. The renowned contemporary artist is known for his powerful architectural and conceptual works that probe pressing current social issues, human rights, and the ethics of representation.

La Fin du Monde focuses on extractive industries and the global supply chains of critical minerals — the natural resources required for the tools and technologies essential to our daily life, from our phones to computers to electric cars. The exhibition centers on a single work The End of the World (2023-2024) composed of ten of the most precious minerals in the world: cobalt, rare earths, copper, tin, nickel, lithium, manganese, coltan, germanium, and platinum.

“The end of the world is a provocation, but it is also a reflection of the sorry state of our planet, of the ecology of the planet,” Jaar said. “I feel that governments around the world and corporations around the world have been criminally irresponsible regarding taking care of this planet. So it is a very direct provocation to trigger reflection, conversations and thinking about what can we do now, where we are at an edge that would change radically the lives of the next generations.”

As resource wars loom throughout the world, from the devastation of lithium mining in the Atacama desert in the artist’s native Chile to the explicit imperialism of US President Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and public negotiations around access to Ukraine’s natural resources, La Fin du Monde brings the artist’s capacity to make us feel the injustice of the world to the capital of Europe.

Originally created as a site-specific installation at the Kesselhaus building at KINDL Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin, a 20 meter square industrial building, the work is re-imagined in the grandiose nave of the gallery — a space with the capacity to showcase the work’s dramatic play of scale and light. The surrounding emptiness is an essential part of the experience of the work, an attempt to give the object, and all it represents, the gravitas it merits. “I am trying to reduce the complexity of this problem of this collapsing planet into something concrete,” Jaar said.

Trained as an architect and filmmaker, Jaar works with a cutting precision to express his social critique through poetry and pathos, creating a sentient experience of the injustices and violence that underlie our quotidian social structures. His works are always directly linked to real world events, and while he returns to traumatic themes, he does so with a Gramscian optimism, believing in the possibility of art to affect and effect change. “I have always believed that artists do not represent reality, they only create new realities,” he said.