Catalogue | Alfredo Jaar: The Garden of Good and Evil

Commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) for Alfredo Jaar’s 2017 exhibition, The Garden of Good and Evil is a powerful open-air sculptural installation by the acclaimed Chilean-born artist whose work addresses injustice, oppression and human rights abuses. 

Following its initial display, this significant work was donated to YSP by Jaar and a/political, which is an organisation that supports artists who interrogate social and political concerns. 

Relocated in 2018 to a secluded area of woodland adjacent to a lake, the work’s 10 individual steel cells reference CIA “black sites”, carrying sinister associations that create an unsettling dialogue with the surrounding landscape. This accompanying book, published by YSP, documents The Garden of Good and Evil through photography and commissioned texts. 

At YSP, books are designed within the curatorial department and published under our own imprint. This gives creative control and, more importantly, allows us to benefit directly from the depths of understanding established with artists during the realisation of projects. 

We typically produce an extensive catalogue for our headline exhibition annually, aimed at an informed but not specialist audience. Smaller publications are created periodically in response to the programme. 

Major additions to the permanent collection such as The Garden of Good and Evil are rare, as our primary focus is temporary shows. So this title – enabled by Ford Foundation – marks an important moment.

Positioned at the heart of the book are two commissioned texts by eminent academics that extend current critical thinking. Jon Bird’s contribution is a commentary on the narratives and architectures of detention, their political context and interpretation by artists, while Griselda Pollock reflects on Jaar’s YSP exhibition within a philosophical framework. 

Introducing these focused essays, YSP’s director of programme, Clare Lilley, discusses the artist’s practice and how this exceptional work sits within his wider political concerns.

Photographic images and image making are critical to Jaar’s practice, making his close personal involvement in the publication pivotal. Photographs take centre stage, immersing the reader in the work’s haunting atmosphere. 

Jaar wanted them first to speak for themselves, so the book begins with more than 90 pages of full-bleed images even before the title page, taking you on a visual journey around the work through different views and vistas, ranges and perspectives. Even time plays a role. 

Jonty Wilde photographed The Garden of Good and Evil in every season, resulting in a breadth of imagery, from the rich autumnal colours that resonate with the cells’ rusted-steel surfaces, to the evocative bleakness of frost and snow. 

One cell is anchored in the lake itself and, at the suggestion of the artist, Wilde even rowed a boat on to the water to shoot from a more intimate point of view, capturing with great immediacy the work’s allusion to human brutality. 

As well as these fine details, the objecthood of the publication was fundamental to Jaar. Exposed binding – there is no solid spine and the page sections and sewing are left entirely visible – strips the book bare, and its pages sit flush with thick, grey-board covers that lend a heft and solidity, making it a resolutely physical object.