Kader Attia: Activism and the Art of “repair”

The curator of the 12th Berlin Biennale highlights the need for communicating collective trauma through art

DS.WRITER:

Σοφία Θρουβάλα

Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007, aluminium foil, variable dimensions. Installation view Collector, Le Tri Postal, Lille, 2011-2012. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler. Photo: Jean-Pierre Duplan | Image Source: dreamideamachine.com

Kader Attia is a very important artist-activist as they call him. Known for imparting his ideas to the world of art -and the world in general-, he has been honoured with significant distinctions and his work has been included and presented at some of the most famous art spaces, museums and festivals in the world. His relatively recent solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, titled “The Museum of Emotion”, explores, through a series of exhibits that evoke artefacts from an anthropological museum, our relation to the condition of being a part of history, striving -as he stresses- for honest and profound dialogue. His exhibitions are usually accompanied by a series of lectures and presentations, aiming to spark interaction between spectators, artists and specialists of different disciplines, thus touching on Nicolas Bourriaud's theories on relational art.

Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory, 2016, film, 40 minutes; At the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art. | Image Source: artnews.com

Research is the practice that characterises his work, with a fusion of aesthetics, ethics and history, aiming for the so-called "repair". The multicultural quality of his works is directly linked to the concept of collective trauma and its limits. Although the word "repair" as a term is not used dogmatically in the corpus of Attia's work, it remains tied to a -quite problematic- psychoanalytic terminology, at least in the Western world, as it is linked to the traumatic experiences that amount to personalised phobias and traumas. The artist is intensely occupied with these issues and he is also interested in the concept of "catharsis" as a Western type of "forgiveness", which is called upon to regulate and at the same time "repair" the human psyche. All this is elaborated through the research done by Attia, who tries to unite art and history by bridging the gap between them, attempting an emotional and by extension cultural “reparation".

Titles such as “Scars Remind Us that Our Past is Real” (2018, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona) and “Sacrifice and Harmony”, clearly convey the philosophy and language of the artist, while the words “reparation” and “memory ” are recycled again and again in the titles of his texts and in works such as “Repairing the Invisible” at SMAK (Ghent), the “Museum of Repair” at State of Concept in Athens in 2021 and the iconic “Reflecting Memory”. In the latter, the artist exhibits multiple versions of the "traditional", combining the concept of the familiar with the simultaneous feeling of unfamiliarity, in a single space that breaks down into smaller spaces completely different from each other - a model of a whole “world". For this work, Kader Attia won the very important Marcel Duchamp Award in 2016.

Raised between France and Algeria, he is strongly interested in interculturality, in the experience of art as a link between different cultures, in an osmosis that can be traced way back in history. His research activity focuses, so to speak, on the historical development of various cultural groups based on their history and specifically on the traumatic experiences that are passed from generation to generation through oral history as testimony. In particular, he studies how the experiences of deprivation and oppression, the memories surrounding the trauma of violence, loss and war, can somehow, if not initiate, at least explain the evolution of these groups, that is, of the people-nations-societies which indirectly or directly form societies of respective collective trauma.

The Museum of Emotion, Installation view, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, United Kingdom, February 13 – May 6, 2019, Photo by Thierry Bal | Image Source: ehmannmaupin.com

Through the artistic and textual exposure and development of the concept of the collective -meaning mediated- trauma, the artist seeks the catharsis-recognition that results from its re-appropriation and the recovery from it. In order to expand his research, the artist founded in 2016 in Paris La Colonie, a cultural venue in which dialogue and the mediation of ideas could thrive, like an invisible trade which, according to Attia's own philosophy, has been happening for centuries. The interdisciplinary and intercultural organisation of the meetings at La Colonie aimed at the decolonisation of theoretical and practical knowledge, which - freed from proprietary characteristics - can be communicated and bring cultures together. Unfortunately, La Colonie closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Image Source: stateofconcept.org

Kader Attia, J’accuse, 2016. Exhibition view “The Field of Emotion”, The Power Plant, Toronto Courtesy: The artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler | Photo: Tony Hafkenscheid | Image Source: moussemagazine.it

These ideas, distilled from his personal work, turned into a theoretical “manifesto" this year, accompanying the 12th Berlin Art Biennale (2022), under the title "Still Present!", curated by Attia. As he underlines in his curatorial statement, the exhibition is motivated by the sense of the “unrepaired”, by what has been totally sacrificed on the altar of liberal capitalism. Again, he proposes research into the historical changes that brought us to our seemingly irreparable present that heralds a dystopian future. The communication of the wounds, which continue to haunt the societies of (Western) postmodernity, through art offers the first - very important - stage of resolution, the recognition, a basic demand of Attia's activist, curatorial and artistic practices.