Kader Attia is a key artist of the present time, both for the material, intellectual, formal, and allegorical operations he proposes in his work, and for the perspectives he sheds on today’s political, spiritual, and artistic culture. His work garners special admiration for the way in which it combines erudition, critique, and astonishment by engaging with the complexity of the postcolonial experience, as well as for the way in which it reveals the articulation of trauma and aesthetics in modern history. Attia also outlines stories about such disparate questions as animism and the adventure undertaken by creativity in the diverse territories that have been shaken by colonization.
The artist proposes a definitive radical turn in our approach to cultures, traditions, and objects by calling attention to repair as a key social and aesthetic operator in global experience. This concept encompasses both intervening materially in objects to restore their functions, and elaborating cultural scars left by bodily mutilations and wounds provoked by political entities, thus compounding social trauma.
The show A Descent to Paradise presents a short narrative take on Kader Attia’s recent work, defined by a political-theological interpretation of the idea of modernization. His works allude to images of redemption from a variety of spiritual complexes, and to the critique of modernity’s myths.
The exhibition presents multiple perspectives on the pairing of coloniality and modernity: the mirror that, as in Attia’s works, returns every face as a set of incompatible reflections.
In its analogical framework connecting culture and loss, repair and scar, and coloniality and phantom limbs, Kader Attia’s work constitutes one of the most original contributions to the art and culture of our time.
Press release from MUAC
Image: Kader Attia. Some Modernity’s Footprints. 2018. In situ installation, wooden railway sleepers, metal staples. Image courtesy of the artist and MUAC
