The snapshots, which are scattered across the wall as though stuck in the pages of a scrapbook, are by turns joyous and vulnerable.
#Objets banania vente series
In the next gallery is one of Attia’s best known works, “La Piste d’atterrissage (The Landing Strip),” a photographic series of a group of Algerian transgender sex workers living in Paris in the late 1990s and early 2000s, firmly on the margins of society. Nearby Greek mythology enters the scene, in an installation comprising a concrete block suspended over a mirror, wittily titled “Narcissus.” The wall label explains: “For Attia the modular form of these sugar cubes recalls the archetypal form of modernist architecture - the white cube - as well as the Kaaba, the black shrine at the centre of the Grand Mosque, in Mecca.” Contemporary global trade, twentieth-century European architecture, and ancient Islamic devotional practice all converge on the tiny and unassuming television screen. Another video piece, “Oil and Sugar #2” (2007), shows a stream of black oil dissolving a mountain of sugar cubes, which glimmer disgustingly in the sun.
The work is mesmerizing and claustrophobic. In the 2018 video work “La Tour Robespierre (The Robespierre Tower),” the camera slowly and shakily rises up a concrete tower block, story by story, revealing the minute differences of decor on an otherwise monolithic facade. The snails are the only living beings in an urban landscape dominated by grey cement blocks. The Museum of Emotion begins in the suburbs - or banlieues -of northeast Paris, where Attia grew up. The current retrospective of his work at London’s Hayward Gallery, aptly named The Museum of Emotion, proves the artist’s simultaneous capacity for academic rigor and emotional depth. He mines history, politics, literature, religion, art, anthropology, and medicine and finds echoes everywhere: between the facial scars of World War I veterans and members of African tribes, between the emotions roused by authoritarian dictators and jazz singers, between a Congolese “sickness mask” and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” But there is nothing distanced or clinical about Attia’s method. Attia has a talent for verbal and visual puns, for linking seemingly disparate things and giving them new meanings. In the photograph, Snails (2009) by French artist Kader Attia, the molluscs are not a culinary delicacy served on a platter with garlic butter, but a symbol of the squalor and degradation of the Parisian suburbs. By Naomi Polonsky, 2019Ī cluster of snails are glued, like barnacles on a ship, to a disused metal post, which stands in a field of dry grass, a shabby apartment block looming in the background. And if it wasn’t because our apartment is small (and our budget even smaller), we would have accumulated more vide grenier stuff than we already own.Kader Attia’s Work Holds a Mirror to the World’s Injustice.
They allow us to compensate our obsession with Chinese-made electronic gadgets that last until your warranty is up, with objects that, while simpler and less cutting-edge, still serve their purpose decades after they were made. Some of the hottest selling items are children clothes, toys and stuff for babies.įor our generation, though, I feel like frequenting vide greniers (or flea markets for that matter) serves as a soul searching activity. And with the economic crisis, there is no lack of people trying to find a good deal. Despite having to pay a small emplacement fee, vendors always answers the call. Organized by towns and municipalities during the summertime, vide greniers usually coincide with the town’s party (fête du village), and they’re always hosted in public places such as plazas, community banquet halls, or right in the middle of the street (which are closed to traffic, of course) instead than on someone’s lawn. But while the principle is the same as in good ol’ garage sales back in the US (selling old stuff for cheap in order to make space for new stuff), the rules are different in France. Known by different names ( braderie, rederie (Picardy region), foire aux puces, foire à tout (Normandy), bric à brac, troc et puces or vente de garage (in Québec)), the word vide grenier literally means “attic emptying,” the traditional place where people keep their crap this side of the Atlantic. Well, in France, you either inherit them, or you find them in a vide grenier! Let’s says that you need a Charles Aznavour vinyl record, a collection of ugly beer mugs or a cork opener made out of a piece of vine? Where do you go get ‘m? No, not in IKEA or at least not yet. Stuff we’ve acquired from garage sales! (From left to right: egg carton, old tin box, Compagnie Créole vinyl record, vintage scale, Banania vintage tin box, bar memorabilia–Ricard pitcher, Aveze glasses and vintage ashtray)
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