Kader Attia
ICA, Boston, USA
Kader Attia, Sleeping from Memory (2007). Courtesy of the artist and Christian Nagel Gallery, Cologne. Photo: John Kennard.
For his first solo exhibition in the US, French artist Kader Attia crams 24 rough plywood beds with cheap foam mattresses into a single room. Lit by bare light bulbs, and paneled with gypsum board, the installation immerses visitors in an environment inspired by Attia’s own childhood growing up in a crowded apartment in the Parisian suburbs. With the help of local art students, Attia has hollowed out a human silhouette on each of the mattresses.
The space is intended to translate Attia’s claustrophobic childhood experience into equally claustrophobic, but newly evocative, circumstances. We are encouraged to regard it as a ‘memorial to children all over the world whose lives are shaped in crowded dorms and tenements.’
In fact the single central path, which leads directly from one entry door to the other, casts the viewer more in the role of a Dickensian villain in an orphanage than as a tenant. With high ceilings and pristine mattresses, the space is as sterile as a hospital ward. One must slip awkwardly into a gap between two bed rows to get any sense of the crowding described by the artist.
The industrial materials are little more than unconvincing symbols: the first indication of Attia’s seeming struggle with materials in the exhibition. The choice to use industrial materials in an exhibition environment poses the issue of how to deal with their identity as rough or ‘unaesthetic’ objects. Is it the captivating transformation of the humblest of materials into a new, streamlined object which lends meaning? Or does the artist suggest that familiar industrial objects are most evocative as they are – in this case, intrinsically coarse?
The life-sized silhouettes – by far the most striking component of the installation, inspiring the empathetic impulse to place one’s own body in the contours on the mattresses – also seem half-heartedly executed. Hands and feet are rendered shallowly, with excruciating caution, and great attention to splayed fingers. Some figures are unexpectedly feminized with cavernous breasts and buttocks; others possess heads several times as deep as the rest of the body.
The noticeable differences in the way each figure is rendered may be an effort on the artist’s part to individualize them, giving faces to the masses he hopes to evoke. But both their irregularity and the slightly amateur quality of the carving summon up a very different set of individuals. These hollows seem less like the markings of the impoverished children of the world and much more palpably like the index of (unnamed) art students at work.
In Attia’s installation, social engagement is forestalled by the more immediate demands placed on the visitor: to stand in a sleek, clean room and imagine oneself in the midst of chaos; to read the index of one specific group of youths as the representation of another, vague body of children; to look at what seems to be an artwork delayed, a prototype, and consider it finished.
At the ambiguously titled ‘Momentum 9’ such questions have not been pondered quite enough. Where better carving would smooth the visitor’s transition from Attia’s story to the current exhibition and its broader humanitarian message, what appears as sloppy execution stalls one’s thoughts at the team of local students who participated in the installation’s construction.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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