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Kader Attia, Untitled (Ghardaïa), 2009/2017, installation view, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2016, cooked couscous on plinth, digital prints on paper, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Collection, New York, image courtesy the artist, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong © the artist
Exhibition
Kader Attia
12 Apr 2017 – 30 Jul 2017
Event times
Mon-Tue 10-5pm
Wed 10-9pm
Thu-Sun 10-5pm
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- 140 George St
- Sydney
New South Wales - 2000
- Australia
Travel Information
- Circular Quay or George Street
- Circular Quay Station
French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (born 1970) works across diverse media including collage, photography, video, sculpture and installation. This major new survey exhibition encompasses over a decade of the artist’s practice.
About
Exploring ideas around cultural exchange, appropriation, and the tangled relationship between North Africa and the West in the wake of decolonisation, Attia articulates theories of ‘repair’ and ‘reparation’ through his practice. These ideas are expressed through objects and installations that juxtapose broken objects – African masks with highly visible, jagged repairs – alongside documentary imagery of World War 1 veterans with significant facial injury and surgical reconstruction.
Absence and the void are further themes within Attia’s practice. Ghost (2007) comprises an installation of empty aluminium-foil casts of seated Muslim women in prayer. In Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014) over 100 doors are split into halves and presented in a vast, upright formation of A-frames. They recall bodies in a crowd that surge forward in protest, a sensation enhanced by the work’s title (‘Murderers! Murderers!’) and the megaphones mounted on top of them.
Attia’s installation The Construction of Fear: A Culture of Evil (2013-) extends the theme of injury and response through interlocking steel shelves that suggest an archive or library. On the shelves are late 19th and 20th century books and newspapers that extend the colonial gaze into the present through their depiction of European encounters with a non-Western, uncivilized ‘other’.
Curated by Chief Curator Rachel Kent, this is the first solo presentation of Kader Attia’s work in the Southern hemisphere.
Kader Attia will also be presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 30 September – 26 November 2017.
