Kader Attia

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS

Kader Attia has for some years been dealing with concepts of repair and reappropriation. These were first expressed in his comprehensive installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures at documenta 13. Attia sees history as a continuum of repeated repairs and appropriation of what already exists. Even if history is rewritten over and over again, even if the child sooner or later has to separate radically from its mother, the belief that there exists a kind of creativity entirely unconnected to history is still an illusion. "The instinct to repair a defect is inherent to all living organisms and to all cultures“, Attia said in an interview in the New York Times (11 June 2013).

Particularly in a town like Salzburg, which looks as though it is preserved in its original 16th-18th/19th-century form, this impression depends on permanent repair, in the sense of preserving a fictive original state. Kader Attia is interested especially in the ease with which the façade can hide the fact that it is based on constructed knowledge.

In his course, Attia will first use lectures and discussions to present his theory of repair, focusing on major questions concerning modernism – as for instance, how it is inseparably linked with colonialism, or how it is based on the concept of man's mastery of nature. Equally important, however, is practical work with a wide variety of (artistic) materials and textures, taking as a starting-point the method of repair.

The aim of the course is to examine one's own creative process, to reassess the concept of artistic creativity, and to find new approaches within the reappropriation of existing materials and ideas.