Kader Attia is a French-Algerian multidisciplinary artist whose research-based approach has been instrumental for decolonial strategies – to backlash colonial history and museums. His interest and subjects found a turning point since he focused on creating tools for repair and care, either of objects, bodies, representations, and memories.
La Valise oubliée [The Forgotten Suitcase] (2024) interweaves individual and collective histories of the Algerian War (1954-1962), during which hundreds of thousands of Algerians were killed. This recent video work by Kader Attia takes the suitcase as a dynamic metaphor of both the past unveiled and the future to be edited (playing with the potentialities of an unfinished narrative). Attia unpacks three suitcases, three individual stories that interweave threads of our collective history: those of French artist and Algerian sympathizer Jean-Jacques Lebel, feminist decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès, and Attia’s mother. The memorabilia removed from the luggage evokes intense, sometimes traumatic memories – from a secret letter by a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front (entrusted to Lebel) to a photo album belonging to the controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès (Françoise Vergès’s uncle), who defended Algerian militants during the war, to photographs of the artist’s mother. By juxtaposing different narrative levels and threads, Attia tells the story both of his family and of the countless nameless men and women who resisted and organized in the shadows against colonialism.
As often in Kader Attia’s work, the awakening of consciousness about the immensity of the destruction and loss under colonialism (either through ecology, architecture, or economy…) goes with a traumatic experience of counting, reenacting, and archiving the dead or the wound. Hence a general ghostly memory is efficiently enacted in his installations and video works; as exercises of exorcism.
Having grown up between France and Algeria, Kader Attia uses his own transcultural experience (including the neocolonial suburban lower class condition) as an introspective research eventually becoming a tool against neocolonial power structures. From The Repair of Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012), shown at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, to the recent Un descenso al paraiso [A Descent into Paradise] (2025), at MUAC, Mexico City, Kader Attia’s art of repair walks on the thin line between dis-membering and re-membering.