The MO.CO. hosts until September 22, “Descent to Paradise”, an impressive monographic exhibition by the famous visual artist Kader Attia.
This is the first exhibition of this importance for Kader Attia in the South of France; which is not insignificant for this important artist whose peaks extend internationally but whose roots sink beneath the Mediterranean.
Sculpture, painting, photography, collage, installation, video… the Franco-Algerian visual artist uses every means possible, without ever considering art for art’s sake, but always expressing through it the wounds of the world and the need to heal them as much as to think about them. “We often talk about the political dimension of Kader Attia’s work, particularly through his idea of reparation, but not enough about the beauty of his work. It is this reflection that led to the organization of this exhibition.”, explains Numa Hambursin, the general director of MO.CO. As aesthetic as it is, and poetic as it sounds, the said exhibition does not abandon any ethical or political discourse. Quite the contrary! Even in the physicality of the museum journey specific to the Montpellier contemporary art center.
Discovering that traffic flows from the first floor down in stages to the basement, Kader Attia saw in it the exact opposite of the promise of modernity and capitalism based, according to him, on the “illusory” belief in constant progression (or accumulation, it’s all the same) upwards, towards ever higher. Moral: his exhibition, which aims to invite the opposite movement, is entitled “Descent into Paradise” and, in a de-escalation inspired by Dantesque, invites us successively to purgatory, to hell and finally to Eden.
In purgatory
The first is that of waiting and leaving, of their ambivalence. Thus, a superb series of photographs of men from behind contemplating the horizon from the bay of Algiers tells us the dream of exile. Let one hold and the others will follow? Indeed, only one does not scan the distance but the current events in his newspaper. With Kader Attia, the meaning is always there, offered, limpid, poetic, understandable with the guts, the heart.
An installation of blue Mare Nostrum clothing is titled “La mer morte” (2015). A neon sculpture flashes “DémonCracy” (2003). A wire mesh fence encrusted with paving stones is titled “On n’imprisonne pas les idées” (2018). To these metaphorical obviousnesses, we can prefer the superb series of collages “Following the modern genealogy” (2012-2018), filled with architectural references and intimate memories, which are juxtaposed with the projection of a slow vertical tracking shot on the face of a building in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the artist grew up.
In hell
On the ground floor, the stay in hell imposes silence. The series “Culture, Another Nature Repaired” (2024) occupies an entire room: monumental wooden busts sculpted with chisels and axes that bring together traditional African art and modern art, and form an assembly of broken faces, victims as much as lookouts of a wounded world. “On silence” (2018), which takes up another room, makes us raise our eyes to the sky: a strange effect of a ceiling strewn with old prostheses…
The “critical work on the blind spots of modernity”as Kader Attia himself defines it, continues with a collection of crucifixes from non-Western cultures forcibly Christianized and in counterpoint the installation “Intifada, the endless rhizomes of revolution” (2016) with its metal trees where bud slingshots…
In Paradise
After the installation of twenty-one rain sticks on motorized arms which suggests the circular nature of time, while calming our skulls in the middle of a storm, we descend, finally, to paradise… which the visual artist imagines on the side of ancient kingdom of Lan Na in Thailand.
A diptych of beautiful videos projected on the entirety of a wall testifies, through the voice of a peaceful transsexual, to the singular relationship with ghosts and trees cultivated by the inhabitants, Buddhists and animists, of this part of the Golden Triangle. We collapse on cushions so as not to miss anything, and we dream of our repaired link with nature, with the world. Kader Attia’s art has no other end.
