Kader Attia

Kader Attia, The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil 2013, metal shelvesinstallation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2017. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong © the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil is made up of multiple stacks of pre-fabricated steel shelving units. Visitors are invited to walk between the towering structures, encountering the books, journals and loose sheets that are fixed to their shelves.

Attia describes the work as a statement on perceptions of difference or ‘otherness’, in this case Western representations of a non-Western ‘other’. ‘Modernity’, he says, ‘as a European concept has to do with the perception of superiority. It’s not only about race, or racism, but a process that has denied the history and legacy of ancient traditions.’

The growth of popular media imagery relating to terrorism and radical Islam today perpetuates this thinking, he says. Feeding a culture of hostility, fear and prejudice, it is borne out of sweeping cultural stereotypes that can be traced back to the failures of colonialism and the modern, Western mind itself.

Kader Attia, The Debt 2013 (video still), 2-channel video, projection, colour based on the original 2-channel slide presentation, 9:33 minutes, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Les Moulins, Beijing, Habana © the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

The Debt is a two-screen video projection of imagery that Kader Attia has assembled from various historical and modern sources.

Doubling or pairing is a recurring element in the artist’s work, providing a way to reveal comparisons between different narratives and disciplines. In this case, he says, most of the time when people speak about Africa —especially in relation to the International Monetary Fund — it is in the context of poverty and ‘a debt’. Attia grew up with regular conversation about African debt, yet no one acknowledged the ‘debt’ that Europe owed to Africa in regards to the devastating legacy of colonialism and slavery. Neither did they acknowledge the debt owed to the many African soldiers who fought and died at war on behalf of European armies across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Kader Attia, Asesinos! Asesinos! 2014, 134 wooden doors, 47 megaphones, dimensions variable, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art, Istanbul © the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Asesinos! Asesinos! transforms wooden household doors into a vast marching formation. Split into halves, then hinged to form A-frames, the doors have a distinctive human-like quality that is enhanced by the presence of megaphones on top of some of them. The work’s title – which translates as Murderers! Murderers!
– encourages this association, suggesting a public gathering or protest march. While Attia’s work implies noise, the megaphones remain silent in the gallery. Speaking about the work, Attia has described the powerlessness and silencing of individuals in the face of oppression, censorship, or totalitarian rule.

Doors, Attia notes, are loaded with meaning. They are everyday domestic and architectural forms as well as powerful dream symbols, associated with passage to another realm. Their domestic function as the entry point to the home is particularly meaningful to Attia, who explains that he first conceived of the work during the American ‘subprime’ mortgage crisis of the late 2000s. This devastating financial crisis saw thousands of individuals and families across the country lose their homes, following a collapse in housing prices which led to a deep recession in the United States, Europe, and beyond.

Kader Attia, Ghost 2007/2017, aluminium foil, dimensions variable, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne © the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Ghost comprises a dense mass of aluminium foil gures, kneeling and bending forwards in states of prayer. Loosely based upon the artist’s mother – whose body he modelled when rst making the work – Ghost uses a simple, ordinary household product in its fabrication which is wound around the body, over and over, until a semi-rigid surface is built up. The foil is then moulded carefully by hand around the shoulders and spine of the model, revealing human contours, and lifted off the body to form an empty shell.

Absence and presence are persistent themes within Kader Attia’s art. On approach, Ghost appears to be a huddled mass of bodies, but they are revealed as empty shells when viewed from the reverse angle. The relationship of emptiness and fullness has preoccupied religious scholars and philosophers for centuries; as the artist observes, the void left by the gures in Ghost is as important as the surrounding forms.

This iteration of Ghost was produced with the assistance of
Jacqui Shelton
Annette Allman
Flory Ambarita
Haley Ball
Erika Beiza
Tyson Campbell
Georgia Cooper Stanbury
Anna May Cunningham
Lynden Cunningham
Anita Davies
Sophia D’Urso
Emma Hakansson
Emily Hubbard
Zoe Jackson
Emma Jensson
Jessie Mae McCIure
Ciara Murphy
Sarah Murphy
Brett Parisi
Tilly Perry
Dominic Reid
Kashi Rufilli-O’Sullivan
Mino Wu
Gia Jiayao Zhou
Anne Dribbisch
Beatrice Gabriel
Chloe Martin

Oil and Sugar #2 takes two basic products of consumerism and trade as its focus, transforming one through the addition of the other. At the beginning of the video we see a neatly stacked arrangement of white sugar cubes that resembles an architectural structure. Just outside the screen, a hand pours crude black oil onto the sugar stack; it slowly caves inwards and slumps, dissolving into the base of the dish that supports it. Largely silent, Oil and Sugar #2 is punctuated by occasional background noise and birdsong from outside the artist’s Paris studio, where the work was filmed.

Kader Attia has spoken about his interest in different aspects of religious devotion, from prayer (as expressed in the adjacent silver foil installation Ghost) to the architecture of worship. The square represented by the sugar cubes recalls the Ka’aba, a cubic building situated within the holiest mosque at Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The building’s transformation across history — from an ancient pre- Islamic place of worship, to Islam’s holiest site after Mohammed — is alluded to in the video.