![]() The snails are the only living beings in an urban landscape dominated by grey cement blocks. The Museum of Emotion begins in the suburbs - or banlieues -of northeast Paris, where Attia grew up. The current retrospective of his work at London’s Hayward Gallery, aptly named The Museum of Emotion, proves the artist’s simultaneous capacity for academic rigor and emotional depth. He mines history, politics, literature, religion, art, anthropology, and medicine and finds echoes everywhere: between the facial scars of World War I veterans and members of African tribes, between the emotions roused by authoritarian dictators and jazz singers, between a Congolese “sickness mask” and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” But there is nothing distanced or clinical about Attia’s method. Attia has a talent for verbal and visual puns, for linking seemingly disparate things and giving them new meanings. In the photograph, Snails (2009) by French artist Kader Attia, the molluscs are not a culinary delicacy served on a platter with garlic butter, but a symbol of the squalor and degradation of the Parisian suburbs. By Naomi Polonsky, 2019Ī cluster of snails are glued, like barnacles on a ship, to a disused metal post, which stands in a field of dry grass, a shabby apartment block looming in the background. Kader Attia’s Work Holds a Mirror to the World’s Injustice. ![]()
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