Kader Attia
2021Reason's Oxymorons
Kader Attia
With Les oxymores de la raison Kader Attia has created an expansive video library containing interviews with philosophers, ethnologists, historians, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, musicologists, patients, healers, fetishists, and griots. Its volumes are edited according to themes like “Genocide,” “Totem and Fetish,” “Reason and Politics,” or “Trance.” The videos make up an essay on psychiatric pathology as it is perceived in traditional non-western as well as in modern western societies. In its mix of rational explanations and irrational representations of what the west calls psychiatry, the work is particularly concerned with the question of the unrepairable, inherent in the idea of “repair,” and calls into question the ambivalence of the psyche of modern western societies towards traditional non-western ones.
Reason's Oxymorons
Mimesis as Resistance
Kader Attia
The Australian lyrebird has evolved the ability to perfectly mimic different sounds like no other bird. During the mating season, the lyrebird sings a mixture of its own tunes and those of other birds for hours on end. With the encroachment of humans upon its habitat, the birds have been exposed to new sounds, and they have been known to incorporate into their songs noises such as car alarms, camera shutters and even the sound of a chain saw starting up. It is therefore the only animal that incorporates the sounds of its own environment’s gradual extinction.
Mimesis as Resistance
Reflecting Memory
Kader Attia
A cinematographic poem that presents interviews with surgeons, neurologists and psychoanalysts on the phenomenon of the 'phantom limb', the sensation and subsequent hallucinosis that a missing body part still remains connected to the body following physical amputation.
Reflecting Memory
