J'Accuse
For many years, Kader Attia (*1970 in Dugny, France) has been exploring the principle of "repair", which he sees as a constant in nature and human history. At the Berlinische Galerie, he is showing the two work complexes "J'Accuse" (2016) and "The Object's Interlacing" (2020).
Image gallery
Foto: Installation aus hölzernen Skulpturen, die auf Sockeln aus geriffelten Metallstangen stehen.
Kader Attia grew up in France and Algeria. He rose to international fame not least with his contributions to the Biennale di Venezia in 2003/2017 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. In 2022 he curated the 12th Berlin Biennale.
Kader Attia - installation “J’accuse” (2016) and “The Object’s Interlacing” (2020)
“J’accuse” includes an extract from Abel Gance’s anti-war film of that name made in 1938 and 18 busts of “gueules cassées”, French servicemen whose faces were badly disfigured in the First World War.
Here Attia continues to explore his concept of “repair”, which has been at the centre of his art for many years.
Kader Attia - installation “The Object’s Interlacing” (2020)
In “The Object’s Interlacing” (2020) Attia talks to a range of experts about returning cultural assets stolen during the colonial era. Without attributing blame, he draws on different contemporary perspectives – philosophical, legal, anthropological, psychoanalytical, museological and financial – to construct an understanding of restitution as a practice of repair with far broader implications than simply the repatriation of objects looted from their place of origin.
These two pieces by Attia are complemented by selected collages made by Hannah Höch for her iconic series “From an Ethnographic Museum” (1924-1934).
In them, Höch combines magazine illustrations of non-European artworks with images of parts of the body or face of mainly white women from the 1920s.
In doing so, she also creates an aesthetic of fragmentation and repair, which inspired Kader Attia to integrate her works into his solo exhibition.
Additional information
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