Artist Talk. Metropolitan Perspectives
Monday,February 16, 2015, 6 pm
RepaiR
Book presentation and discussion with artist Kader Attia (Berlin, Paris)
In his multilayered works Kader Attia examines the transcontinental history of Europe and Africa since modernity. The focus is on the historical and social ruptures, which are still being written up to the present day. In his complex installations, he incorporates artistic material from diverse sources, as well as methods and visual languages from anthropology, ethnology and philosophy. Running against disciplinary conventions, he creates connections between divergent historical events and political spaces. He presents the topics of differences between the uprooting in decolonial African societies and the uncertainty in neoliberally marked consumer societies of Europe as sociopolitical complexes and links them to the European treatment of colonialism and migration nowadays. In the project Stadtkuratorin Hamburg Kader Attia is dealing with with the decolonialization of the everyday. For ten years, he has been working on the complex of “repair” and “re-appropriation” as global, cultural concepts. In October 2014, BlackJack Editions (Montreuil-sous-Bois) moreover published the first comprehensive work in English RepaiR with interviews, translations for the first time and previously unpublished texts from Jacques Derrida, Franz Fanon, Marion von Osten, Ana Teixeira Pinto and many others.
Kader Attia (born in Dugny, France in 1970) lives and works in Berlin and Algeria. He became internationally famous through his participation in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Amongst other places, his works have been shown in the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2015); New Museum, New York (2014); 5. Marrakech Biennale (2014); Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2014); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012) and ZKM, Karlsruhe (2011). In 2014, he received the Berlin prize for art Jubilee Foundation 1848/1948.