Major exhibition showcasing the work of Kader Attia opens at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha
The exhibition features two important new commissions. The first, The Object’s Interlacing (2020), consisting of a film and a series of reproductions of African sculptures, explores the labyrinthine debate surrounding the restitution of objects taken from Africa during colonial times.
The second, On Silence (2021), is an installation made up of a large number of body prostheses, referencing objects of repair for people who lost one of their limbs in zones of conflict.
Kader Attia: On Silence is curated by Abdellah Karroum, former Director of Mathaf and current Special Curatorial Advisor to the Acting Deputy CEO of Museums, Collections and Heritage Protection for Qatar Museums and Director of the National Museum of Qatar Sheikha Amna bint Abdullaziz bin Jassim Al Thani.
The exhibition features the full range of Attia’s work across all media including site-specific installations, sculptural works, objects, collages, drawings, video, and photography.
Developed through meetings and discussions between the artist and the curator in Berlin, Doha, and Paris, this research-based show is created for the particular context of Doha, as a multi-cultural global city of migration, which is continuously changing and adapting itself to social and political developments in the region and in the world.
Notions of heritage and aspiration, convention and transgression, colonialism and liberation, are a few of the topics that are addressed in Kader Attia’s work.
Abdellah Karroum said: “2021 is a hugely significant year for multiple reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic, raging silently across the world, is just the latest and most traumatic global crisis. Developed in 2020 and presented in our anniversary year, the exhibition deals with issues that concern the whole world, but it also looks in depth at the cultural, social, and historical issues of the region, with a deep awareness of the multiple crises we face.
"This show, drawn from the artist’s personal experience and the multiple crises in today’s world, presents major themes of postcolonial trauma and the processes that followed for decades as a psychiatric ‘repair’ at the social and individual level. The artist’s intention is to provoke the viewer’s emotional and physical experience,” he added.
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, established in Doha by Qatar Museums in partnership with Qatar Foundation in 2011, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Mathaf is a pioneer organization, the world’s most important resource for the study and display of 20th and 21st-century art from the Arab world. it is a major collecting institution as well as a center for research and study.
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