Press release
KADER ATTIA
Tsunami
22 October 2006 – 7 January 2007
from Tuesday to Sunday, 2 -7 pm
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Kader Attia has specially created a single work for the central space
of Le MAGASIN, which he has entitled Tsunami. This huge wave in sheet metal has
a maximum height of 12 metres, is 14 metres wide and 40 metres long.
In answer to a question put some months ago by Jean-Louis Pradel, Attia has
supplied the key to what he calls “a kind of visual, political and psychoanalytical
condensate”: “The idea comes from Africa where, ever since I did
my national service as a Cooperation worker, I have liked to go back and recover
and rest after a period of intense work, far from the mobile and the stress of
big cities! So, I was in Lubumbashi. Down there, in the middle of nowhere, under
the blazing desert sun, the huts are, like everywhere else, like in Algiers or
Johannesburg, covered with sheets of corrugated steel and not with traditional
vegetal materials, even though these provide much better insulation. As a result,
they’re like ovens inside. This material got me thinking, both because
of its incongruous use in the sun and because of its form. Its undulation reminds
me of the sea. I am going to reproduce this wave and amplify it until it becomes
a giant wave, a tsunami. It will represent an allegorical vision of great contemporary
climatic catastrophes. A meteorological disorder as alarming as chaos in the
political climate. Since El Niño, it has been clear to all that climatic
disorder is also one of the consequences of bad politics… I didn’t
want to put any other pieces around this Tsunami because this work is a synthesis
(…) It is about both the victims of the tsunami and those inhabitants
of the planet who are reduced to cannon fodder for unfettered capitalism. This
gigantic wave in corrugated steel also evokes the steel rain that lashes down
on the peoples who are bombed day after day in these new wars that we consume
daily on the media without saying a word. Our society is like this wave of steel
made of a rudimentary material – corrugated sheet metal: it is rising very,
very high and giving the impression that at any moment it’s going to
collapse, destroying everything in its wake.”
Kader Attia was born in the Parisian suburbs in 1970 and grew up in the cosmopolitan,
multicultural atmosphere of Sarcelles. “His art is rooted in the complex
links between East and West, it reflects all the tension of the clash between
these two different worlds — an uprooted North African culture and a seductive
Western culture based on consumption. Deeply grounded in this duality his work
implements a social critique using sculpture, photography, drawing, installation
and video; his thoughtful style, coloured by his own personal suffering, moves
between humour and despair.” Over the years, Attia’s art has become
increasingly abstract. It includes installations that question visitors about
their fantasies and phobias.