Kader Attia

(Born in 1970 in Dugny, France)

This work is not currently on view. 

Oil and Sugar #2, 2007
Video on DVD
4:30 minutes, color, with sound
Promised gift of James and Audrey Foster

Momentum artist Kader Attia's hypnotic video shows motor oil being poured onto a crystalline cube of sugar stacked on a silver platter. As the white solid absorbs the black liquid, it crumbles and pools as a glistening viscous mass, rife with open-ended metaphors for art, religion, and politics. Like Attia's work for Momentum 9, presenting a dormitory of beds with depressions of bodies now missing, the work harnesses complexly layered meanings through the marriage of simple and familiar materials. "I am interested in the evocation of something through its contrary," says the artist, a goal achieved through these powerful works that explore creation through disintegration and presence through absence.

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