The French-Algerian artist Kader Attia will present works at the 13th Lyon Biennale this autumn (La Vie Moderne, 10 September-3 January 2016), which, the organisers say, focus on issues raised by the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in Paris in January. Attia says that the works indirectly refer to the attack, in which two gunmen killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine.
The artist’s pieces in Lyons include a site-specific project that involves repairing the cracks in the floor of La Sucrière, the exhibition venue, and a mixed-media piece featuring interviews with ethnopsychologists about immigrants’ experience of adjusting to a different culture. Attia says that young, disaffected Muslims in Europe often “find grounds for their despair, among other things, in the immaterial injuries caused by their ancestors’ colonisation—dispossession, oppression and humiliation”.
Ralph Rugoff, the guest curator of the biennial, says: “Attia is a brilliantly inventive artist whose artistic approach and ideas about repairing our modern past are central to the Biennale’s exploration of how the contemporary is always riddled with multiple histories.”
