Camp, from the project Real Pictures

After traveling to Rwanda in August 1994, Jaar embarked on his most extensive humanitarian endeavor to date, known as the Rwanda Project (1994–2000). A direct witness to the aftermath of ethnic genocide that killed nearly one million people and displaced countless others, Jaar documented the situation through photographs and survivor interviews that contributed to a number of installations. One such project, Real Pictures, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1995, featured more than 550 black archival boxes, each concealing a photograph within. Similar to Minimalist sculpture, the boxes were arranged in rows or stacked in groups directly on the floor in a modular fashion. Jaar intended this “cemetery of images” to present the enormity of the tragedy without bombarding the viewer with images to the point where, in his words, “we don’t see them anymore.” Jaar instead denies the viewer access to the images, whose subject matter he describes in white text on the cover of each box.