Alfredo Jaar: Inferno & Paradiso

Inferno & Paradiso is an immersive slide-projection exhibition by Alfredo Jaar at Photo Elysée in Lausanne. Visitors sit in a darkened room while 40 photographs are projected in 20-minute cycles: for each of 20 photojournalists, the image they consider the most painful and the one they consider the most hopeful. The two poles of the title are the whole programme.

The work was co-produced with the festival Cortona On The Move, where it premiered in 2025. In Lausanne it runs from 26 June to 1 November 2026 at Photo Elysée, Place de la Gare 17.

The format strips photography back to looking: a dark room, a seat, and images that appear one after another. Each 20-minute cycle sets the most painful pictures of twenty photojournalists against their most hopeful ones, and the sequence keeps moving between the two poles of the title. In the dark, with nothing to distract you, you stay with each photograph for as long as it is projected.

The rhythm does much of the work: each cycle holds the hardest images against the most hopeful ones, and the distance between the two is what the exhibition is about. The projection simply continues, so a second round costs nothing but twenty more minutes, and the same photographs read differently once you know how each of them was chosen.