Kader Attia

Comprehensive monograph

This monograph gives a comprehensive overview of the variety and scope of the research carried out by Kader Attia (*1970 in Dugny, Seine-Saint-Denis, lives and works in Berlin and Algiers) over the past 15 years, using media as varied as installation, video, photography, and collage. It highlights the unique and powerful ways in which Attia addresses the global entanglement of culture, politics, and identity. Attia’s artistic research is informed by his own experience of moving back and forth as a child between France and Algeria, between the Christian Occident and the Islamic Maghreb, and later by his years spent in Venezuela and the Congo. His work tackles, in a very explicit yet poetic way, the entangled relationship between Western thought and non-Western cultures, particularly through architecture, the human body, history, culture, and religion.

Essays by Noémie Étienne (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York), Kobena Mercer (Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University, New Haven), and an extensive interview with the artist by Monique Jeudy-Ballini and Brigitte Derlon (CNRS, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, Paris) offer new insights into Attia’s practice.

Published with the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.