Kader Attia

Kader Attia has been exploring through an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to research the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals — each of them being connected to collective memory. The artist's social-cultural research has led him to the notion of repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity — any system, social institution, or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth, and history. Kader Attia founded in 2016 'La Colonie' in Paris, a space where knowledge is de-compartmentalized by a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary, and trans-generational approach. In the same year, the artist was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize.