Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotions


Fascinating exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of work by conceptual artist Kader Attia.

From the first room which had various works looking at post-war housing estates I was grabbed. The room was dominated by a video installation panning up a block of flats, showing all the different lives being lived in them, then rising above the roof to the view beyond. With it was a suspended breeze block and a metal abstracted model of one of the blocks.

Another room looked at how objects are exhibited in exhibitions and in particular what this says about the history of colonialism in European countries. I loved the papier mache packaging shown on plinths which resembled African masks but were in fact waste products. Also the stained glass feature in the corner which showed the back of a fragmented window behind gallery wall which had been broken through. You went round the corner to see the front of the glass. This seemed particularly poignant just two days after the Notre Dame fire.

My favourite piece was a whole room “The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occident Cultures” which looked at how we repair objects and people. It looked like a museum store room and had a focus on the facial injuries of the First World War and juxtaposing this to ethnic groups with a culture of deliberate facial scaring. It included a series of busts by Italian and Senegalese artists each representing the other’s cultures. These were shown with various films about the soldiers and about how different cultures repair objects in general, either hiding the repair or deliberately showing it as part of the life of the object. 

Closes on 6 May 2019

Review
Evening Standard


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