Alfredo Jaar, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

In 2011, the American poet Adrienne Rich published a poem titled Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. Written in the shadow of war, displacement and political upheaval, its title carried a startling admission from one of the 21’s most important literary voices: there are moments in history when language appears unequal to reality, when suffering exceeds the capacity of words to describe it, and when poetry itself seems to arrive too late.

Twelve years later, in November 2023, Alfredo Jaar returns to Rich’s words amid the grief, shock and devastation that followed the attacks in Israel on October 7 and the escalating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, Jaar has repeatedly confronted the ethical limits of representation, asking what art can do when faced with human suffering on an overwhelming scale. From Chile under military dictatorship to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, his work has persistently challenged the assumption that images alone can produce understanding. Instead, he has often focused on their failures, their absences, and the spaces where language breaks down altogether.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve continues this enquiry with characteristic restraint. Occupying public screens across London, Berlin, Milan, Seoul and Tokyo, the work consists of a single phrase suspended within the machinery of contemporary spectacle. In a landscape ordinarily dominated by advertising, persuasion and consumption, Jaar offers no image and no explanation. The work neither illustrates tragedy nor attempts to speak on behalf of its victims. Instead, it creates a pause, transforming the public screen into a site of reflection on the inadequacy of language itself.

Yet the title contains a productive contradiction. If no poetry can serve, why invoke poetry at all? The answer lies at the heart of Jaar’s practice. The statement is not a rejection of culture but a challenge to it. It acknowledges that art cannot stop violence, cannot restore lives already lost, and cannot substitute for political action. At the same time, it refuses the alternative of silence. The work occupies the fragile territory between speech and speechlessness, between mourning and action, between the recognition that words are insufficient and the conviction that they remain necessary.

This tension became the foundation of the wider project. Throughout November, CIRCA invited poets, musicians, artists and writers including Hanne Lippard, Shirley Manson, Ivan Cheng, Hala Alyan, Eileen Myles, James Massiah and many others to respond to Jaar’s proposition. Their contributions did not seek to resolve the dilemma posed by Rich’s title. Instead, they inhabited it, producing a collective chorus of voices that attempted to speak where certainty had become impossible.

For Jaar, this gesture is inseparable from a lifelong belief that culture must remain a space of freedom, particularly during moments when public discourse narrows and political language hardens into opposing certainties. If the work begins with the proposition that no single poem can serve this moment, it ultimately suggests that poetry’s value may lie elsewhere: not in its ability to provide answers, but in its capacity to hold complexity, grief, contradiction and humanity together when other forms of language have failed.

Presented only weeks after the escalation of violence in Gaza, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve stands as both lament and act of resistance. It is a work about the limits of expression, but also about the necessity of continuing to search for words despite those limits. In Jaar’s hands, Rich’s title becomes less a declaration of defeat than a question directed back towards us: how do we continue to speak, to listen and to remain human when history confronts us with what appears unspeakable?

Alfredo Jaar is one of the most influential artists of the past four decades, internationally recognised for a practice that confronts political violence, humanitarian crises and the ethics of representation. Working across installation, photography, film, architecture and public space, he has consistently asked how art can respond to injustice while preserving the dignity of those whose stories are too often overlooked or erased.

Born in Santiago, Chile, and based in New York, Jaar emerged during the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship and developed a body of work that examines the relationship between images, power and public consciousness. From his landmark Rwanda Project to iconic public interventions such as A Logo for America and I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, Jaar has challenged audiences to consider not only what is visible, but also what remains unseen, unheard or deliberately obscured. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a profound belief in art’s capacity to create spaces for reflection, empathy and civic responsibility.

In 2023, Jaar collaborated with CIRCA on Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, a major public intervention presented across London, Berlin, Milan, Seoul and Tokyo. Conceived in the weeks following the attacks of 7 October and the devastating humanitarian crisis that unfolded in Gaza, the work reflected on the limits of language in the face of human suffering. Taking its title from a poem by Adrienne Rich, the commission emerged from a growing sense that words alone could not adequately respond to the scale of grief, violence and despair unfolding before the world, while creating space for poets, writers and artists to contribute their own acts of witness and reflection. Released alongside a fundraising initiative supporting Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, the project reflected Jaar’s enduring belief that art and culture remain essential spaces for empathy, moral reflection and resistance.

A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Hiroshima Art Prize and Hasselblad Award, Jaar has participated in the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial and Documenta, while realising more than seventy-five public interventions worldwide. His work is held in the collections of institutions including MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofía and M+ Hong Kong. Through a practice that combines conceptual rigour with profound humanitarian concern, Alfredo Jaar continues to challenge how we see, understand and respond to the world around us.