PRESENTATION: Kader Attia-On Silence

Kader Attia was born in France and spent his childhood between France and Algeria. The more he grew up, the more he felt that being “in between” was at the root of his identities. Attia’s work explores the impact of Western cultural and political capitalism on the Middle East and North Africa, as well as how this residual strain of struggle and resistance to colonisation impacts Arab youth, particularly in the suburbs of France where Attia lived. While each new series employs different materials, symbols and scale, Attia’s practice continually returns to a sustained look at the poetic dimensions and complexities of contemporary life.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mathaf Archive

Modern and contemporary history holds some of the noisiest tragedies that humanity has lived through, and our present moment is affected by the traumatic memories of these events. Colonialism, political oppression and environmental devastation have led to massive migrations across continents, transforming social ecologies in every centre of the world. Yet the ideologies and systems of governance today continue to create zones of silence that bury many of these histories. Kader Attia’s solo exhibition “On Silence” reflects on silence, a phenomenon that can trigger the need to scream,  through works that provoke a visceral appreciation of postcolonial trauma and the process of psychiatric ‘repair’. Focusing on Attia’s practice over the last two decades, the exhibition deals with topics affecting all humanity while looking specifically at the Middle East and North Africa. In this region the “deafening silence” on cultural, social and historical issues is transforming taboos and limited spaces of expression into challenges to public life and political debate. The exhibition aims to engage the audience in reflections on issues of heritage and aspiration, convention and transgression, colonialism and liberation, the local and the transnational. All these are addressed in Attia’s work, as are debates on ecology, and our material and non-material relationship to the universe. The continuing thread through his art is a focus on how enforced silence can lead to oppression and trauma, and how this silence can be broken during revolutionary moments in response to injustice. Two major new works have been commissioned for the exhibition. The first, “The Object’s Interlacing”, which consists of a film and reproductions of African sculptures, explores the labyrinthine debate surrounding the restitution of artefacts taken from the continent during colonial times. The second, “On Silence” is an installation made of multiple body prostheses, presenting objects of repair for people who have lost limbs in conflict zones. The work, placed at the centre of the exhibition, invites visitors to reflect on the exhibition themes, which create a powerful catalyst for discussion and contemplation. These two recent works evoke the idea of silence as a necessary state in every dialogue, alongside voices, movement, imagination and emotion. Kader Attia’s breakthrough work, “Ghost” (2007), began as a cast of his mother. Childhood memories of seeing her in prayer, among dozens of devout Muslim women, prompted the artist to wrap her in layers of aluminium foil as she knelt, creating a life-size figure with the characteristically shiny material. He then repeated the process until he had a crowd of 40 figures, with minor variations in posture and arranged neatly in a grid to form an installation. Viewers approach the figures from behind, mimicking the perspective from which Attia would have encountered the long and narrow spaces that often served as mosques in the Paris of his childhood. Only when they reach the other end of the exhibition space do they realise that the figures are empty shells; their burka-like hoods each conceal not a face but rather a haunting void. “Ghost” is mostly about wider, weightier ideas, among them the perception of religion, the search for a sense of belonging, and the promises and pitfalls of multiculturalism. These complex themes have long fascinated Attia: his first sculpture, titled “The Dream Machine” (2003), showed a hooded figure staring at a vending machine stocked with purportedly halal versions of items that are either forbidden in the Islamic faith, or intertwined with ideas of modernity: pork products, alcohol, an American passport, a visa card. The “The Dream Machine” took on colonialism and its modern manifestations: “There’s this idea that “non-white” populations have to become white inside, all the while staying the basis of society, the slaves of capitalism” says Attia.

Photo: Kader Attia: On Silence, Installation view Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, 2021-22, Image courtesy of the artist and Mathaf, Photo: Markus Elbaus

Info: Curator, Abdellah Karroum, Assistant Curator, Lina Ramadan, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Education City Student Center, Doha, Qatar, Duration: 8/11/2021-31/3/2022, Days & Hours: Sat-Fri 9:00-19:00, Fri 13:30-19:00, www.mathaf.org.qa