The Unlimited section of Art Basel is often associated with contemporary art at its most spectacular and, by extension, entertaining. But at the heart of the section this year is a grave and troubling reflection on world events by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia.
Arab Spring (2014) consists of 16 glass vitrines, empty but for stones that have shattered their glass; more boulders and bricks lie at the cabinets’ feet. The work was triggered by the plundering of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2011, and uses the same traditional display cabinets that were raided by the looters.
“Anger of people”
Although it refers to a specific event, it is also Kader’s metaphor for much more. “What fascinates me in this image is the fact that on one side there is this undoubtable disappointing aspect of what the Arab Spring has been,” Attia says. “And now we are in front of this incredible mess, where all the revolutions have been taken over by the military on one hand or by radical Islamism on the other hand.” But he also argues that the pillaging of the museum “really symbolised the anger of people, but also this deep desire to repair the psychological injuries and political injuries within the society they’ve been shut out of”.
The work is relevant for the events of recent months, he says; the destruction of cultural sites in Mosul and elsewhere “raises questions that we have to wonder about constantly, regarding what does culture mean? And what does the destruction of cultures mean?”
Cultural destruction
Attia admits that he “was always sceptical about the Arab Spring” because of historic events in Algeria. In the late 1980s, pro-democracy demonstrations ultimately led to an Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut, winning power at the first elections, a subsequent military coup and then a 10-year civil war. “I remember very well that my father, as an old Algerian communist, used to tell me that Arab countries do not need democracy,” he says. “What they need is a growing economy first, and then, when their great grandsons are rich enough, they will make a revolution.”
Attia’s work consistently explores political and social issues with reference to his experience of growing up in both Algeria and France. He studied fine art and philosophy in Paris in the 1990s, and the history of ideas is as prevalent in his work as the history of art. He confronts directly the connections and ruptures between the Western and non-Western cultures that he straddles, with particular emphasis on the legacies of colonialism. But his work is as topical as any art today; although he says that “in my process of working I really do care about poetry” and adds that he is “not a TV person; I am much more a radio person”, he explains that he “can’t stop having an eye on the news; it’s really important as a contemporary artist”.
He has watched recent events in Mosul with horror, saying that Islamic State’s actions there were “much more scary” than mindless violence: “When IS arrived in Mosul and in many other places, they did not only destroy the museums or archeological Assyrian sites; they burned 500,000 books… Until now, it almost makes sense—that these guys are fascists, because it reminds us also of the Nazi process of what Heinrich Heine [the German poet and essayist] said: ‘Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’”
But Attia adds that, a week after burning Mosul’s books, “the IS militants brought back 20,000 books for this library, but their books—their radical theories and essays and visions of Allah and humanity. And this is extremely interesting because it means that at the same time that they are destroying, they are building a culture.”
After Charlie Hebdo attack
This taps into the central theme of Attia’s work: what he calls injury and repair, symbolised in the Arab Spring work. He explores it through works that take very different forms. Some are minimal and provocative, taking “a very simple shape in a very simple way, that is in one way powerful”, he says, concisely addressing the meeting of Western and non-Western, secular and religious cultures. Among them are the 3,000 beer cans arranged in the shape of pilgrims around the Ka’bah in Mecca in the work Halam Tawaaf (2008), shown by Lehmann Maupin at this year's Frieze New York. But the other key strand of his work consists of installations containing a “very complex corpus” of materials, as he puts it, taking an archival form, using cabinets and shelving.
Among these archival works is an installation at the centre of Attia’s current exhibition at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne (until 30 August), The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil (2013). It links to Edward Said’s theories on Orientalism and particularly what Attia describes as “the representation of the ‘other’ as a total… caricature”. He adds: “The women, who are slaves, are naked, young, beautiful; they’re set up in the camera or the painting to create desire—the desire of the Western, white male fantasy, and the dominating male. On the other hand, the Arab or the sub-Saharan African, or even the Asian man, is always represented with a knife or a sword, always beheading, as in the Massacre at Chios by Delacroix.”
The Culture of Fear installation, Attia says, “places side-by-side newspaper covers and documents from the 19th century—from the UK, from France, from Belgium and from many European countries—which aimed at representing this other to colonise as a wild cannibal, as an anthropophage”. He links the boom in newspapers in late 19th-century Europe to the rise of the internet today and argues that “exactly the same caricature… a caricatural representation of the Arab embodying traditional violence”, has been just as prevalent after 9/11.
Attia’s next project, for the Lyon Biennale in September, reflects on this subject, and particularly the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings in January. “Again, we are still very much living the injuries of colonisation,” he says. “But I have to say that it has become much more important for me nowadays, especially after Charlie Hebdo, to make this issue contemporary and to not only talk about the past and stay in the past.”
Failures of psychoanalysis
The work, a video installation, is complex thematically, looking at the failures of psychoanalysis in dealing with colonial questions, which he links directly to modern Islamism. He argues that young people, the grandsons of the migrants who left their bankrupt post-colonial homelands for European countries after independence, carry with them “the injuries of their ancestors, which have been kept within the family’s subconscious for generations”.
This has led to “a lost generation”, he says. “For those who have been lucky enough to meet good people, the right people, and also had the energy to work at school, they could save themselves. But because of poverty, segregation, an absence of any political and educational project about the colonisation of their ancestors, you now have lost teenagers connected to the web. And what happens in this huge vacuum left by the so-called democratic state is that these people get manipulated by other, smarter people on the opposite side of the world, using the internet to brainwash them and attract them into their dark agenda and project.”
Attia passionately believes that mixing “a political message with a poetical form” can make a difference. “I really do believe that art has an incredible political power,” he says. With France still reeling from January’s events, it will be intriguing to see how acutely his Lyon project reflects this conviction.