Kader Attia: Look at the wound

Seville,

Both for the formal and material aspect of its proposals and for its allegorical character and its intellectual dimension, the production of the Franco-Argelian author Kader Attia has been interpreted from points of view closely linked to our present time, in what has to do with culture, politics, art and even spirit. A good part of their projects are based on the postcolonial realities and outline their aesthetic articulation: they especially interest this artist, who in 2017 received the Joan Miró award, the development of creativity in previously dominated territories, the notion of repair from a social and artistic approach, that is, the intervention (sometimes material and others not) about past objects and ideas They mitigate the pain derived from political root wounds, and the compatibility or not between colonial past and modernity where the first is given.

His own biographical experience, halfway between France and Algeria, has allowed him to deepen, from that particular case of common history, in the complexities of the public debate both in the countries that were empire and in the old metropolis and in the possibilities of soften collective traumas, concepts that provide the essential background to their facilities and sculptural assemblies, widely exposed in international museums and in international museum The Biennials of Venice, Sharjah, Shanghai or Gwangju, manifest or document.

Until next January, it is the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art. Caac who shows his creations, in one of the first exhibitions of Attia in Spain (the Miró Foundation gave him another in 2018, with the significant title of “The scars remind us that our past is real”). The Sevillian, called “The Lost Paradise”, consists of past works and new productions: sculptures, facilities, videos, collages and objects, made of materials as diverse as marble, glass, wood, paper macha and steel, which in a more or less explicit way they affect the idea that the West has approached that concept of repair trying to erase the physical trace of colonialism, while in colonial Other cultures These material signs are accepted and occasionally incorporated into artistic processes. This last way is the one that, for this author, contributes to a greater extent to healing the potential wounds.

Jobs like Venus dogón (2024), Ghost (2007), The Dead Sea (2015), s/t (Mirrors) (2022–2024), About silence (2021), Intifada (2016) or Reinterpretation (2024) are approaching, from different angles, to the representation of the wound as a footprint that to be cured must be thought, and of paradise as a symbolic space that, according to the commissioner, Jimena Blázquez, also director of the CAAC, is necessarily transformed by the loss, resilience and criticism.

The piece that opens the route is precisely Venus dogóna sculpture whose classic base overlaps a carved trunk that alludes to traditional African aesthetics; Between one part, Attia did not seek to generate harmony, but on the contrary: to promote a clear visual contrast that affects that all identity is built based on strata. Ghoston the other hand, it has been reworked in collaboration with students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Seville and has dozens of hollow figures molded in aluminum foil; In this case, they refer to silenced individuals throughout history, arranged here in prayer. As to The Dead Seawhich has completed a decade, is done covering the ground with used blue garments, in reference to the drama of migrations in the Mediterranean; Each object symbolizes an absence and memory holder.

In the CAAC they have also stressed work on paper maché created from industrial food containers, canvases that due to their visible seams embody the option to devise new images without denying damage or recent projects Eternal conversationmural executed with dry pumpkins and stainless steel containers that, while linking the ancestral and the modern, links the organic and the industrial, and Pluvialité #1a video in which the rain invites us to think about historical evolution as a process based on erosion and persistence.

They complete the exhibition Some footprints of modernityspace intervention with reused train beams, raised as a palpable footprint of industrial colonialism; Intifada: the endless rhizomes of the revolutionnetwork of recycled materials that remembers underground resistances; About silencecomposed of prostheses that float as absent bodies; Halam Tawaafbeer cans whose ritual distribution places them halfway between consumerism and faith; Mirror masksa question of the idealization of African traditions, or another mask, Reinterpretationthat having been applied in wood refers to repair as a critical repetition process.

Finally, Following modern genealogy It is a visual cartography of the modern historical story from the discontinuity of the collage and THE GREAT MIRROR OF THE WORLD It does not give rise to loss with its broken fragments on the ground. In the hands of Attia, vulnerability is a force with transformative power.