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Contemporary Arts Center
Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center
for Contemporary Art
44 E. 6th Street,
Cincinnati, OH 45202

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A Thread of Light

Started
04 September
2020

Ended
17 January
2021

Exhibition Highlights

Exhibition Details

Working with installation, sculpture, photography, and video, Kader Attia examines the symbiotic relationship between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and the oppressed. Attia’s research-based practice focuses on understanding the individual, national, and societal wounds shaped by Western imperialism and its aftereffects. A Thread of Light (2019) is a nine-minute video wherein Attia explores his personal family histories of trauma through the childhood recollections of his mother. Refusing to depict these untold sufferings with images or articulate them verbally, her memories are instead mediated through the artist, who incises them, word by word, into black scratchboard.

Many of Attia’s videos rely on an interview structure to shed light on the personal accounts of persecuted and displaced populations. In the film, Héroes Heridos (2018), for example, Attia used first-person narratives of immigrants and activists to document the plight of asylum seekers, shedding light on issues related to citizenship, migration, and political nativism. However, while Attia has interviewed and filmed his mother for more than 20 years, A Thread of Light withholds that archival material. Rendering her story with text alone, Attia rejects showing her likeness, questioning the conventions of representation itself. The film's abrasive soundtrack, which alternates between silence and intense scraping, references the repeated acts of transgression performed by his young mother, as she scratched away the black paint her caregiver had applied to all windows in the house where she was raised. Although a minor offense, her gesture serves as a symbol of resilience and resistance against gender-based violence and the silencing of victims of abuse. Attia’s video is a censure against structures of oppression and a testament to the limits of image-based modes of visibility.

Artist

Kader Attia

About the Artist

Kader Attia was born in 1970 in Seine Saint-Denis, Dugny, France. He studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré, Paris (1993); the Escola Massana, Centro de Arte y Diseño, Barcelona (1994); and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1998). His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and recurring festivals including the Venice Biennial (2003, 2011, 2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2008); Havana Biennial (2009); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); Marrakesh Biennial (2014, 2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Hayward Gallery, London (2019); and Kunsthaus Zürich (2020).Attia currently lives between Berlin and Algiers.

Curated by

Amara Antilla, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center

Sponsored by

National Endowment for the Arts CAC Exhibition Fund

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