Kader Attia
30 September – 19 November
Last year’s recipient of France’s most prestigious art award, Le Prix Marcel Duchamp, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia proposes that the more we understand of our history, the better we can participate in society.
Attia’s genre-defying practice explores ideas of cultural exchange, appropriation and the tangled relationship between extra-Occidental cultures and the West in the wake of decolonisation.
Media including collage, photography, sculpture and video are enlisted to make manifest these daring enquiries into cultural memory and the repercussions of global events, while the grand scale at which Attia often works is equal to the enormity of the questions he asks.
This major new survey exhibition the first to be shown in the Southern hemisphere, encompasses over a decade of Attia’s practice and includes:
Ghost 2007, an installation of empty aluminium-foil casts of hollow figures seated as if in prayer;
Asesinos! Asesinos! 2014, over one hundred doors reconfigured in a vast, upright formation, recalling bodies that surge forward as a crowd in protest;
The Construction of Fear: A Culture of Evil 2013, a vast library of interlocking steel shelves, laden with 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’.
“Kader Attia explores ideas of injury, repair and cultural exchange.”—Art Guide Australia
“As an artist, Attia’s humanity is evident in his films, photographs, sculptures, collages and installations.” — The Daily Telegraph
Presented with the Melbourne Festival in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and curated by Rachel Kent, Chief Curator, MCA.
The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne
30 September – 19 November 2017
Hours: Tue—Fri 10AM—5PM, Sun & Sun 11AM—5PM
FREE
acca.melbourne
Wheelchair Accessible
Media contact:
Katrina Hall 0421153046/kathall@ozemail.com.au