Kader Attia  The Body’s Legacies. The Post-Colonial Body

Over the past five years French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has been developing an expansive oeuvre of films, in which he gives the word to people who are deeply involved in matters of post-colonial life and its cultural, psychological, political and philosophical dimensions. Intellectuals and practitioners routed in Western and Non-Western cultures speak from their knowledge and experience of the ambivalent nature of historical progress that can be regarded as a process of injury and repair leaving its traces in social psychopathology. Attia's film works can be seen as a complex artistic stream of reflection, composed of voices and images giving testimony of the historically determined „fields of emotions“, that are the fertile ground for today’s social condition.

With his film The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2. The Post-Colonial Body Attia reflects on the repressed postcolonial body through interviews with four protagonists that are descendants of colonised people or slaves. His interest lies in the question of what the body of enslaved or colonised people’s descendants has become, in a moment when a new disaster of bodily displacement is happening, namely the current refugee crisis. The narration goes back and forth between individual experiences and wider analysis, with a focus on a particular story as a pivot: the aggression on young Théo Luhaka that happened in February 2017 in a Parisian suburb. The young man was beaten and raped with the truncheon of one of the policemen arresting him. Kader Attia’s film builds a counter-narrative to the Western hegemonic racist national one, setting out to prevent erasure of the violence that is perpetrated in a so-called democracy, and documenting the struggle of those who resist. (Text Manifesta 12)
Alongside the film, we present among others a selection of Kader Attia’s collages, that run like a red thread through his oeuvre, similar to an artistic note or sketchbook.