Kader Attia & Jean-Jacques Lebel, L'un et l'Autre @ Palais de Tokyo

The Culture of Fear

Kader Attia is one of the most interesting young artists working today. I first saw his work when he won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2016. That said, his latest exhibition, l’Un et l’autre, at the Palais de Tokyo is completely different from the works displayed at the Centre Pompidou in Reflecting on Memory, primarily because it is a joint venture with the older French artist, Jean-Jacques Lebel.

 

Attia and Lebel with The Culture of Fear

The blurb at the beginning of the exhibition claims that this is an encounter between the two artists/thinkers rather than an exhibition. Although I am not sure of the difference between an encounter and an exhibition, I do think it would be more accurate to call l’Un et l’autre, a document of an encounter. What we see here are theobjects representing the convergence of interests of two generations, one a French artists steeped in the traditions that motivated the radical art of the 1960s, and the other a French-Algerian whose work speaks to today’s most pressing issues: colonization, migration, social, sexual, physical non-conformism, and so on. To me, this exhibition is a visual equivalent to listening to a fascinating conversation between two artists.

L'Un et l'Autre
Display of objects made from found materials, 

The cohering principle of l’Un et l’autre might be the social construction of the other, a concept noted in the title. However, this is both too general and too specific a description of the dense intellectual ideas visualized in objects and images. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a scaffold of steel shelves supporting magazines from different decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which the language and images of violence and evil are revealed through juxtaposition as fully socially constructed. When violence is done to the African other by France, the colonizer, it is understood and accepted as a form of taming the uncivilized. When the Taliban and ISIS strike the western world in the 21^st century, a mass violence on a similar scale is labelled and treated as terrorism by the evil. The juxtaposition of the magazines across history, countries and the inversion of perpetrators and victims, paints an all too humiliating picture of the way we have manipulated the story to place us on the moral, political, and social high ground. And of course, the western obsession with categorization, archiving, ordering, documenting is embraced and then turned upon itself in an installation that reveals the mendacities hidden by such practices.

 

Dan sickness mask

Around the central space, there are objects, objects once used for violence and war that have been transformed into objects for everyday use. For example, a chair made of rifles, a beer mug made of the of ammunition casing, and German coins recycled into ritual objects by the African colonized are now transformed into objects of wonder. And then, perhaps the most fascinating of all the displays are the sculptures drawn from “the archive,” which really means found and retrieved from the oddest of places. There are some really curious objects such as twins from the Christmas Islands in which two heads have one male body and a female sex, confronting us with questions about the apparent progressive sexuality only now being accepted in the West. In this traditional culture the fluidity of sexes and genders is worshipped. In a series of “sickness masks`’ in which the face of the physical or mental condition of the patient is made visual on the face. As the wall text explains, the polarity between the western myth of facial perfection—often constructed by a surgeon—and this culture’s aestheticization of illness, representing the celebration of individual uniqueness.

 

A Chair made of Knives and guns

Beside each display, a small video shows Attila and Lebel in conversation about the objects contained therein. The video gives an explanation of the provenance of the object, its use, and the reasons for its inclusion. In addition, the discussion ensures there is no possibility of missing the point of the provocative wider dialogue of objects and artists. Ultimately, this fascinating exhibition shows the journey of cultural appropriation—both through objects and people—and critiques integration into our own value systems to create collective memories that are not ours to create. Along the way, we are alerted to the violence of everyday life, the use of things and people in an effort to appropriate power through economic, political, visual and poetic discourses.