Responding to the current socio-political landscape in which xenophobia, terror and anxiety permeate public conscience, Kader Attia and Rachel Kent propose this culture of fear is a continuation of centuries of broken cross-cultural relationships. Initially curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia by chief-curator Rachel Kent, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition in partnership with the Melbourne Festival explores artist Kader Attia’s focus on cross-cultural exchanges between non-Western and European nations. The exhibition autobiographically traces Attia’s French-Algerian background, scholarship in French philosophy and Congo-based activist work. However, Attia’s background is but a starting point augmented into a broad narrative on the infliction of trauma and processes of healing. Through a unified collaboration, the artist’s voice and provoking perspective aligns cohesively with Kent’s curatorial direction, forming idiosyncratic navigation of the pain and division defining the last few centuries and its present-day manifestations.
Attia’s diverse practice, comprising of photography, collage, sculpture, video and installation, embodies injury from traumatic events and the recovery processes which follow. Through reappropriation, the most defining feature of Attia’s work, he attributes new meaning to old material, such as wood, paper, military equipment and kitchen products. Similar to damage experienced by a victim of war or a colonised nation, the recycled material will never again recover its original condition. However, through Attia’s reappropriation, its personal power is rehabilitated. While Attia intimately signifies personal recovery through reappropriation, he also encompasses the grand scale of global suffering through the sheer sizes of his works. His towering installations and large video-screens accompanied by billowing audio forcefully move the exhibition beyond a survey of a philosophically, politically and culturally aware artist’s career to an ambitious commentary on the healing of cultural and personal wounds inflicted by Western powers.
The exhibition’s installation emulates an immersive trail of historical wounds and contemporary pain. First, the visitor becomes submerged into Attia’s Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil; archival shelves storing Western media representations of African and Middle Eastern peoples. The installation is bordered by an untitled shattered European stain-glass window and The Debt, a video of the colonised fighting in the coloniser’s war. The war imagery transitions into the dimly-lit second room presenting J’Accuse; a collection of axe-carved oak African busts and prosthetic limbs forming a pain-inflicted audience watching Abel Gance’s 1919 and 1938 films on the destruction of war. The third room presents Asesinos! Asesinos! (Murderers! Murderers!); a collection of dozens of fragmented doors mounted with megaphones whose protest is vocalised by the impeding video-works’ audio from adjoining rooms. The fourth and fifth rooms are dark, cinematic stages for Inspiration/Conversation, a projection of Cameroon people blowing into crackling bottles to dually comment on the effects of drought and colonisation and Reflecting Memory, a 40-min documentary on the aftermath of losing a limb in a traumatic event, such as a terror attack. The final room on the melancholic trail presents Ghost; from behind the reappropriated aluminium foil shows kneeling, religiously devote figures but the posterior reveals their hollow form and proposes religion as innately problematic. Moreover, the exhibition’s trope of ambitious themes provides a raw summarisation on the pain and division defining contemporary life.
Attia and Kent explore contentious issues usually central to heated debates through an inquisitive investigation on the West’s contribution to painful contemporary and historical narratives. They position colonisation as the ultimate precursor of current global turmoil, arguing historical power structures remain through decolonisation processes, such as fear of the ethnic “other.” Culture of Fears’ lofty shelves storing layers of Eurocentric media dating back centuries signify the dominance of these power structures throughout time. The archive immortalises stereotypes of the colonised “other” as the combined English, German and French voices condemn non-Western cultures as groups of uncontrollable savages lest they experience divine European intervention. Yet, gruesome depictions of 19h century tribal warfare and white saviour syndrome continue into contemporary imagery of African and the Middle Eastern men portrayed as bloody, demonised ‘lone soldiers’ complemented with Leonardo Di Caprio handsomely donning a Tag Heuer watch. Through this introductory installation, Attia and Kent condemn Eurocentric histories and reveal how seamlessly damaging racial stereotypes persist in the present.
Melbourne’s multicultural audiences cannot take an outside perspective as they zig-zag through the immersive steel construction shelves. Entering the exhibition through this installation, audiences must self-reflexively critique historical narratives before inspecting the remaining spaces’ depictions of ongoing injury and processes of repair. For instance, Culture of Fear allows audiences to reconsider prevalent representations of African people and foster empathy appropriate for The Debt’s suggestion of European nations being indebted to Africa following slavery, colonisation and African service in European armies. In Culture of Fear, even the intellectual cannot escape the confrontation of colonial legacies and repercussions through pretence of being superior to popular media’s groundless techniques. Academic texts theorising Africa and the Middle East’s role in terrorism and fundamentalism are pierced into the archival shelves, evidencing academia’s dogmatic contribution to cultural stereotyping. Immersed within the continuous historical and contemporary documentation, the menacing space becomes analogous to the culture of fear penetrating modern life. More so, the remainder of the exhibition suggests broken cross-cultural relationships, reinforced by misguided perceptions of the “other” and the lingering corruption of Western power, are only in early stages of repair as modern-day repercussions persist.
While there was risk in asking diverse audiences to assess complicated cultural histories and contemporary issues, Attia and Kent’s tactful approach of drawing on their own cultural backgrounds alleviates potential conflicts. Having lived in both European and African contexts, Attia bears a cultural “in-betweenness” which grants him the ability to acutely evaluate Western and non-Western cultural relationships. Correspondingly, Kent’s curatorial direction was sensitive and discerning through endeavouring to understand Attia’s cultural background and experiences through intimate conversations which have been skilfully translated into the exhibition spaces.* Through their collaborative structure, the thematic is relatable and stimulating to visitors of different cultural backgrounds rather than alienating audiences on either end of the spectrum. For some, the exhibition is a space to grieve cultural trauma while being empowered in representation. For others, there are historical lessons to be learnt and an opportunity to listen and exercise solidarity in times of healing.
ACCA’s Kader Attia exhibition conveys traumatic events have drastic consequences and, moreover, acknowledgement of imbalanced cross-cultural relationships is the first step toward repair. As the exhibition’s trajectory evolves between artist, curator and audience, judgements are developed of the past to fathom the present. Underpinned by Attia’s philosophy that intercultural relationships cannot exist passively in an increasingly globalised world, the exhibition begs for increased consciousness of power structures’ ability to effect cultural injury. Attia’s stain-glass window presents a wide crack in the face of Jesus Christ and is a sobering summarisation of the exhibition’s determined message: the wounds of cross-cultural relationships can only heal once the perpetrator’s power has been broken.
References
Kent, Rachel, and Kader Attia. Kader Attia. The Rocks, N.S.W.: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2017.
MCA Australia. Kader Attia and MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent. YouTube, April 12, 2017. Accessed October 25, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlU-VeQoqzs&feature=youtu.be&t=73