Kader Attia, Descente au Paradis. MO.CO. Montpellier

He uses drawing, photography, video, sculpture and installation, depending on the singularity of each project. Kader Attia questions contemporary society, giving great prominence to poetry and the induced, focusing on fragile situations, fears, traumas, uprootedness and hopes of reparation. Travel also plays an important role in both his history and his work, invoking cultures marginalized by individual destinies.

For the "Descente au Paradis" exhibition, Kader Attia drew inspiration from the very geography of the MO.CO., its journey from top to bottom, from the sky to the earth and its depths, proposing a reflection on reparation and transcendence that questions the notion of verticality as a vital and spiritual movement. If the wounds of the past irrigate the fractures of the present, juxtaposing eras in a back-and-forth movement, spirituality enables us to escape the grip of History. Like rain, which ravines and transforms, isn't there an elevation that takes place in a downward flow?

If Kader Attia's works have a strong philosophical and political impact, "Descente au Paradis" also bears witness to the poetic and aesthetic concerns of an artist whose research and thinking are grounded in a practice where form and content merge into a language of their own. Alongside some of the artist’s major works, the book presents new creations, including a never-before-seen immersive installation featuring a film shot in northern Thailand, and another made of rain sticks.

The book includes Kader Attia’s interview with Numa Hambursin, curator of the exhibition, a text by Mohamed Amer Meziane, philosopher and author, and a text by Sabrina Kassa, journalist, editor and author. Born in 1970 in Seine-Saint-Denis, Kader Attia grew up in a multicultural, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the Paris suburbs. His childhood was marked by the many trips he made back and forth between France and the Algeria of his family origins.

A graduate of the École supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris, winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2016, and curator of the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022, Kader Attia has built up a body of work that cannot be reduced to any single medium, yet bears the hallmarks of a visual vocabulary all his own.