Kader Attia a Sidney

Il MCA di Sidney propone fino al 30 Luglio una mostra di Kader Attia.

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Kader Attia was the recent recipient of the 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious art award. Central to his presentation at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris was the extraordinary 48-minute film Reflecting Memory (2016), which forms a highlight of the current exhibition. Exploring themes of injury, therapy and the ‘phantom limb’, it opens up ideas around trauma and its unseen repercussions, for both the individual and wider society.

French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (born 1970) works across diverse media including collage, photography, video, sculpture and installation. This new survey exhibition encompasses over a decade of the artist’s practice, focussing on key installations which are contextualised by video and sculptural works.

Exploring ideas around cultural exchange, appropriation, and the tangled relationship between extra-Occidental cultures and the West in the wake of decolonisation, Attia articulates theories of ‘injury’, ‘repair’ and ‘reparation’ through his practice. These ideas are expressed through two- and three-dimensional works that juxtapose broken objects, including African masks with visible repairs, alongside Classical statuary and documentary imagery of World War 1 veterans with significant facial injury and surgical reconstruction.

Ghost (2007) comprises an installation of empty aluminium-foil casts of kneeling women in prayer.

In Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014) over 100 doors are split into halves and presented in a vast, upright formation of A-frames. They recall bodies in a crowd that surge forward in protest, a sensation enhanced by the work’s title (‘Murderers! Murderers!’) and the silent megaphones mounted on top of them.

Attia’s installation The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil (2013) extends the theme of injury and response through interlocking steel shelves that suggest an archive or library. On the shelves are late 19th and 20th century books and newspapers that extend the colonial gaze into the present through their depiction of European encounters with a non-Western, uncivilized ‘other’.

Amalia Pica al Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Molto bella la mostra di Amalia Pica al Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, un sapiente uso di mezzi semplici rinterpretati in modo poetico e stimolante. 

Born in Argentina and based in London, artist Amalia Pica explores metaphor, communication, and civic participation through drawings, sculptures, large-scale photographic prints, slide projections, live performances, and installations. The MCA exhibition Amalia Pica is the artist’s first major solo museum show in the United States and includes approximately fifteen of her most significant works from the last seven years, in addition to new commissions. Using simple materials such as photocopies, lightbulbs, drinking glasses, beer bottles, bunting, cardboard, and other found materials, Pica creates work that is formally beautiful and conceptually rigorous while addressing fundamental issues of communication—such as the acts of delivering and receiving messages (verbal or nonverbal) and the various forms these exchanges may take. She is particularly interested in the role of the artist in conveying messages to audiences and the translation of thought to action, idea to object. Her work is optimistic in its reflection of moments of shared experience, often incorporating signifiers of celebration and communal gatherings such as fiesta lights, flags and banners, confetti, and rainbows.

Having grown up in Argentina, Pica is attracted to the limits and failures of language and concerned with what it means to have a platform to speak out from. Her work raises questions about individual versus collective speech in the context of extreme political situations, such as those in 1970s Argentina or present-day Afghanistan, and demonstrates how open communication is a right in some regions of the world and a privilege in others.

In addition to new work, the exhibition will include Strangers, an in-gallery performance in which two people who have never met before hold a bunting between them for a specific duration.

This exhibition is co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and MIT List Visual Arts Center. It is co-curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at MCA Chicago, and João Ribas, Curator at MIT List Visual Arts Center.