BARCELONA.- ‘Keeping wounds visible is to accept the real. So I set out to repair these wounds by pursuing what my research taught me was fundamental: that repair is an oxymoron that also includes the wound. To deny the wound is to maintain the pain it generates. By repairing history’s cracks with metal staples, with yarn or with patches from other, often contradictory cultures, I give voice to the victims; I allow trauma to speak to us and thus to pave the way for catharsis.’
Kader Attia (Dugny, 1970) defines his artistic practice as the embodiment of a political experience. His work is an exploration that stems, in his words, from the ‘urge to recover, through form, the field of emotion in the public debate with the aim of repairing the wounds of history'. This bold and committed endeavour, which has brought together reflection and action over the course of twenty years, merited the 2017 Joan Miró Prize, one of the most prestigious and bestendowed contemporary art awards in the world, jointly granted by the
Fundació Joan Miró and Obra Social ”la Caixa”.
Kader Attia, the winner of the sixth edition of the prize; Elisa Duran, Deputy General Director of the Fundación Bancaria ”la Caixa”; and Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró, presented the exhibition linked to the prize, Scars Remind Us that Our Past Is Real, at a press conference.
The show, Kader Attia's first solo exhibition in Spain, is the artist's invitation to gradually discover the essential aspects of his oeuvre through some of his most salient pieces from the last few years, as well as newly-produced work. Over twenty pieces including photographs, videos, altered objects, sculptures and installations lead visitors through the areas of friction between cultures that have suffered unequal relationships.
How do we face the pain of the past, both collectively and at a personal level? How do we treat our wounds? What do we do with our memories? And how do we deal with cultural and social debt? In the artist’s view, the West has treated repair of the harshest and most unjust episodes in its wars and its colonial past by attempting to erase their evidence, whereas in other cultures the marks left by traumatic experiences are accepted or even highlighted.
Scars Remind Us that Our Past Is Real, whose title is inspired by an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses, examines the history of thinking about power and the wounds that are denied by the hegemonic narrative in order to, in Attia's words, ‘recall the necessity of their reparation even when they are irreparable’. The project, organized by the Fundació Joan Miró and Obra Social ”la Caixa”, has also received support from the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm.
The exhibition begins in a space that primarily features works about the relationships between architecture and colonial history. A large installation made of couscous mimics what could be the scale model of a negative of a city in the desert in which the buildings have disappeared leaving nothing but their empty footprints behind. The image of this absence serves as a metaphor of the dynamics of dispossession, appropriation and reappropriation that have dominated East-West relations derived from colonisation. Other pieces in this room, such as the Dé-construire et Ré-inventer lightbox or the La Tour Robespierre video, are connected to the artist's research concerning the influence of Eastern vernacular architecture on modern Western architecture and, in particular, the impact of traditional Afro-Arab construction – specifically, the legendary Algerian city of Ghardaïa – on the aesthetics of Le Corbusier. The installation Indépendance Tchao – in which the artist reproduces a hotel in Dakar that has been closed down for a decade using the index card boxes where the Algerian police kept its reports on activists –completes this area devoted to architecture as a body that shows its own scars in public spaces.
The marks of the past on the skin of history like wounds on human faces – to be hidden or shown – is the central theme around which the pieces in the next room revolve. One of the artist's most renowned works presides over this space: Open your eyes, a video installation in which images of traditional African objects are paired against Western elements and photographs of disfigured soldiers from the First World War held in the archives of the Historisches Museum in Frankfurt, the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées in Paris and the Wellcome Collection in London. Next, the sculpture Chaos + Repair = Universe, a shattered world assembled with rudimentary metal staples, exposes the fissures through which its unity has been woven, an image that the artist uses to suggest the cyclic universal order of destruction and repair as well as the contemporary globalisation process. The effects of globalisation on people, often visible as wounds on a body, are precisely the subject matter of the video that Attia produced specifically for the exhibition and is shown in this room. It is a three-screen installation titled Héroes Heridos and based on a series of interviews shot in Barcelona gathering the testimonies of people and organisations committed to denouncing issues such as the situation of migrants, detention centres for foreign persons, the criminalisation of unlicensed street vendors and the use of rubber bullets by the police.
According to Attia, this video represents 'the ethic reverse of many pieces in the exhibition that address the same issues from a more aesthetic perspective'.
‘From culture to nature, from gender to architecture, from science to philosophy, any system of life is an infinite process of repair.’
For Kader Attia, any wound calls for repair and the work of art plays a crucial role in this process by enabling catharsis. The artist has devoted a large part of his career to researching the notion of repair based on the analysis of natural dynamics and the different cultural approaches to this concept. The next space in the exhibition includes some of his most relevant pieces in this regard, such as J’accuse, an installation featuring a series of busts carved in wood, again based on the portraits of wounded soldiers from the First World War. The striking sculptural ensemble acts as a prologue to the screening of the eponymous antiwar film shot by the French director Abel Gance in 1919. The room also houses the stainless steel sculptures shaped by the artist in the Fundació's spaces specifically for this project, which, hanging on the walls, act as distorting mirrors, as well as slashed canvases repaired with embroidery titled Mirrors.
‘Works of art — written, painted, or performed — are mirrors, for better or worse, of histories past, present, and future.’
Precisely, the last room in the exhibition elaborates on the metaphor of the work of art as a mirror that forces us to face our own image, be it individual or collective. The works featured here include Repaired Broken Mirror #9, a sutured looking-glass which, when we look into it, reveals the scars that shape us and which we have learned to forget or conceal. This piece establishes a dialogue with other salient works in the show such as Mirror Mask, an African ritual mask studded with mirror shards that alludes to the fragmentary, fractured nature of all identities. The exhibition closes with a projection of Reflecting Memory, a film poem that places the phantom limb syndrome – the perception of often painful sensations coming from an amputated limb as though it were still connected to the body – in a dialogue with the injuries left by historical trauma that live on in the collective psyche and send out constant calls for repair. These traumas are the subject of two other works that are reflected in Attia's maze of mirrors: the word Humiliation sculpted on a wall panel and the large installation titled Intifada, which takes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as the point of departure to examine the links between reappropriation and reparation.
