French-Algerian artist Explores Identity and Repair

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/French-Algerian-artist-Explores-Identity-and-Repair.html

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PARIS — The installation featured childlike figures playing in a giant bird cage, oblivious to the relentless pecking of pigeons. A few weeks later, little remained of the 45 shapes of children made of rags and grain, but the 150 pigeons were well fed.

The self-destructing work by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, titled “Flying Rats” and highlighting human frailty, was first exhibited at the Biennale de Lyon in 2005 and was inspired by a childhood memory. “As a child once, I tripped in the schoolyard and passed out,” Mr. Attia said in an interview in Paris. “When I came to, I was surrounded by pigeons.”

He continued, “I liked the idea of the spectator standing in front of this scene of death, fragility and weakness and witnessing the passage of time.” This exploration of the relationship between time, history and memory has become a signature theme of Mr. Attia’s, making for a body of work that is often rich with emotion and fragility.

“Flying Rats” is hardly the only piece that Mr. Attia, 43, has based on childhood experiences. The artist was raised in a family of seven in Dugny, a suburb to the northeast of Paris, where he confronted the daily challenges of multiculturalism, uprootedness and identity that characterize a neighborhood predominantly inhabited by immigrants. But he acknowledges that such issues are complex. “I don’t deny my origins, but my slogan is not ‘I am immigrant,”’ he said.

Over the past year, the artist has explored the historical roots of attitudes toward immigrants in Europe today, and he has devoted his art to reopening chapters of forgotten or repressed history. Those explorations are at the center of an exhibition titled “Repair. 5 Acts” showing at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin through Aug. 25. It is his first solo institutional show in Germany, where he settled six years ago to free himself of the constraints of the Paris arts scene.

In the exhibition, the artist explores themes of physical repair and cultural appropriation, Western attitudes to multiculturalism and postcolonial guilt. “The new show looks at the colonial history of Europe and the debt that it owes to African populations who fought on the side of colonial powers during World War I,” Mr. Attia said. “That is contrasted with current immigration restrictions and the closing of Europe’s border to the population of its former colonies.”

This year at Art Unlimited, Art Basel’s exhibition platform for outsize projects, Mr. Attia presents a 14-minute double-screen video projection called “The Repair” that features wounded World War I soldiers and explores the ethics of conflict and divergent notions of beauty.

Mr. Attia had previously addressed these themes in a monumental installation he presented last summer at Documenta, an international art festival held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The work, titled “The Repair From Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures,” explored the heritage of European colonialism in Africa within the framework of World War I. Rows of steel shelving display a postcolonial cabinet of curiosities including vintage photographs, colonialist literature and historical archives, alongside busts of disfigured soldiers known as the Gueules Cassées, or Broken Faces, of World War I. It also showcased African artifacts bearing signs of repair, objects made in the trenches by soldiers using bullet cartridges and artillery shells, and hybrid objects from non-Western cultures integrating elements of the West.

For Mr. Attia, such hybrid or repaired objects symbolize the resistance of colonized populations. “Repair and hybridization are the terrain where many cultures begin to take back their liberty,” he said.

Mr. Attia came to view the notion of repair as central to understanding multicultural relationships after two years of research at institutions including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. “The instinct to repair a defect is inherent to all living organisms and to all cultures,” he said.

He became fascinated by artifacts that had been repaired, often discarded in Western cultures and not exhibited in museums, like a Congolese object of devotion whose original shell-shaped eye had been replaced by an ordinary button. “Integrating a Western element into an African object is an intentional act,” Mr. Attia said. “It means the slave is beginning to devour the symbols of power.”

Ellen Blumenstein, chief curator at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, turned over the art center’s 1,000-square-meter, or 10,760-square-foot, space to the artist to explore that notion in the context of politics, culture and science. “The concept of repair continues to occupy Kader’s mind and his artistic development,” Ms. Blumenstein said. “It made sense for us to let him follow his passion.”

In the Berlin show, the artist focuses specifically on the notion of the outsider in Western culture and the heritage of European colonial history set against current immigration policy. “I wanted to revisit the issue but take the notion of repair a step further,” he said.

To illustrate the theme, the artist juxtaposes repairs to the human body through plastic surgery, body art and prosthetics, and contrasts Western and African concepts of beauty. In another part of the exhibition, he shows frayed snapshots of clean-cut European soldiers that he found in flea markets, and whose torn edges he has repaired with red thread. Nearby are broken mirrors he has held together with metal wire, displayed next to framed engravings of 19th-century surgical procedures. “In the mended mirrors, the visitor will see his own face as if scarred by the metal wire,” Mr. Attia said.

Ms. Blumenstein highlighted the artist’s ability to add some levity to serious themes, with the use of forms and images that are easily accessible to the public. “Kader’s ideas may be complex, but he is clear in his communication,” she said. “His material can be disturbing, but he makes his concepts accessible.”

Over time, Mr. Attia has fine-tuned an artistic vocabulary that, like poetry, expresses profound messages through relatively simple means. In a piece titled “Oil and Sugar #2,” a five-minute video installation completed in 2007, a white block built of sugar cubes implodes as black oil is poured onto it, a piece that explores the relationship between art, money, religion and power with simple means.

“The strength of Kader is that he can use common materials to express something completely unrelated and explore complex themes,” said Yves Aupetitallot, director of Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, in Grenoble, France, where in 2006 Mr. Attia presented the installation “Tsunami,” made of undulating sheet metal, a material he had seen used in Zambian shantytowns.

In “Construire, Déconstruire, Reconstruire,” or “Construct, Deconstruct, Reconstruct,” an exhibition shown last summer at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the sound of breathing could be heard throughout the exhibition. Its source was a video installation titled “Inspiration/Conversation,” that shows two black men, face to face, blowing into an empty plastic bottle. “It was the sound of all of Africa wheezing,” Marcel Brient, a French art collector, said in an interview. “Kader’s work fits in the tradition of minimal, conceptual work, but with a French touch that is both tender and rigid.”

Many doors have opened for Mr. Attia since his presentation at Documenta last year. “Kader’s piece at Documenta summarized all the issues central to the show, like changing notions of beauty, colonialism and its impact on cultures, and the importance of archives as both a means of preserving memory and a generator of ideas,” Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said by telephone. “It was a tour de force that took Kader’s work up a notch, in scale, complexity and impact.”

Last year, the museum acquired a video by Mr. Attia titled “Open Your Eyes” that was shown last autumn in the museum’s Performing Histories series, an exhibition of media artworks. “Kader’s work is complex, it gives you something to think about, and people come away moved,” Mr. Lowry said. “What more can you ask from an artist?”