Bodies, Spaces, and Artifacts. Montage and Reparation as Forms of History, Kader Attia, ex. cat. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, JRP Ringier, 2015, pp. 73-81. (original) (raw)

She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future -Laurie Anderson, For Walter Benjamin, 2001 1 Kader Attia collects things. His work features fingernails, actions, traces. Houses, towns, and landscapes. Maps, masks, and books. It is as if he has dismantled the stands of a Universal Exhibition to put them back together in his own way. Or as if he slipped over to the exit of a colonial fair from the 1900s to gather up its fragments, its junk, and then mount them in photographs, sculptures, spaces. His frequent use of slides projected side by side in a technique introduced by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in the late 19th century is also the art of creating links: Open Your Eyes (2010), for example, juxtaposes repaired African statues with photographs of soldiers who suffered facial disfigurement in the First World War. Both humans and sculptures have been transformed, the latter often with the addition of exogenous material such as a nail replacing an eye, or a piece of plastic. But what is the difference between objects and subjects in the slide show? The soldiers with the scarred faces were mere cannon fodder who mattered little for the men who sent them to the front. On the other hand, the sculptures, most of which seem rare and precious, were not ethnographic objects for their creators, but rather regalia, ancestors, tools, and so on. They were active and powerful. They remain subjects because they have been repaired and their transformation creates an effect: as new hybrid artifacts, they have a place in a world that they put back into play.