Kader Attia: Injuries Are Here

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts is hosting a major exhibition showcasing the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b.1970, Dugny). The event, curated in close collaboration with the artist himself, is his first solo exhibition in Switzerland.

Kader Attia draws on a broad range of media from installations to photography and video for his striking explorations of clashes and exchanges between culture, politics, and identity. His artistic research is heavily influenced by his own experience of growing up in France and Algeria and time spent as an adult in Venezuela and Congo. His work offers a poetic yet highly explicit reading of the relationships between Western thought and non-Western cultures, particularly through architecture, the human body, history, and culture.

Kader Attia‘s work over a span of nearly two decades reveals a growing preoccupation with the issue of repair, understood in its twofold meaning of repairing an object or healing a wound and making recompense for the harm done. This explains the significance in his oeuvre of the object and the archive as tangible traces of History and of wounds that demand reparation. He turns the installation space not only into a memorial space, but also a place for rethinking the intrinsic bonds linking political, personal, and aesthetic (hi)stories that at first glance might appear to be unconnected. The Lausanne exhibition offers a rich panorama of Attia’s oeuvre, from his installations, videos, and slide shows to his canvases and collages.