Construire, déconstruire, reconstruire: le corps utopique — Kader Attia — Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 24 → August 19, 2012

Sept En juillet, Slash fête le mélange des genres en faisant un pied de nez aux sirènes de l’été ; c’est en effet la notion du travail de l’artiste qui est à l’honneur ce mois-ci.

Kader Attia is invited to present, in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, a monographic show around La Piste d’atterrissage (2003), a work acquired by the museum in 2006. This slide-show describes the private life of Algerian transsexuals exiled in Paris. Strangers in their own body as well as in a different culture, they build their identity by re-appropriating both fields. Postulating that the body is the first architecture, Kader Attia articulates his proposal around the idea of repairing and re-apropriation, a recurring theme at the origin of his work. An invocative narration of the body’s utopias and the modernity is created in the projections, objects, collages that mix characters, urban landscapes and vernacular architectures, which comprise the exhibition. The artist offers a reflexion on transgression and imagination in honor of Michel Foucault (The utopic body) and Le Corbusier .

This project is part of a series of invitations addressed to the artists whose works have recently enriched the collection. It is an occasion for a concertated mediation between the MAC/VAL, which has also invited Kader Attia to show a specific work for the new presentation of its collection “Vivement demain” (Can’t wait for tomorrow).

Kader Attia was born in 1970 in Paris to Algerian parents. He studied Philosophy and Art in Paris. In 1993, he spent a year at the Escola de Artes Applicades in Barcelona. His first solo show took place in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since then, he has frequently been shown around the world. Kader Attia’s childhood, between France and Algeria, oscillating between Christian Western and muslim Maghreb, had a determining impact on his work. Using his own identities as a starting point, he questions the ever more complicated relation between Europe and its immigrants, particularly those of Muslim faith. By doing this, he does not restrict himself to one medium to explore controversial subjects.