KADER ATTIA: REFLECTING MEMORY

KADER ATTIA

REFLECTING MEMORY The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

KADER ATTIA

REFLECTING MEMORY The Block Museum of Art Northwestern University January 21 – April 16, 2017

Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory was organized by the Block Museum in partnership with the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The curatorial team included Block curators Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Janet Dees, and Antawan I. Byrd, PhD candidate in Art History. Support for the exhibition was provided by the Myers Foundations, the Diane and Craig Solomon Contemporary Art Fund, the Alsdorf Gallery at the Block Museum Endowment Fund, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Front image: Reflecting Memory, 2016, 40 minutes, HD film, screened on a continuous loop. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano. Left image: A visitor to the exhibition Kader Attia: Relecting Memory, Copyright Sean Su Photography

INTRODUCTION Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern of Contemporary Art Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory, an exhibition of work by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, was commissioned and presented at the Block Museum of Art from January through April 2017. The project emerged over a two-year period, starting in the Spring of 2015, that included three intensive visits to Northwestern University’s Evanston and Chicago campuses. The visits were hosted by the Block Museum in partnership with Northwestern’s renowned Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.

Established in 1954, the Herskovits Library contains the largest collection of materials related to African Studies outside of the continent of Africa, including the intellectual work of scholars based on the continent. In addition to publications in a variety of formats and from across disciplines, the library’s collection also preserves and makes available for study more unexpected holdings, such as an extensive collection of posters, commemorative printed textiles, and the Obama in Africa Collection, which documents African responses to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and terms in office.

Photographic collections are among the most important and distinctive collections within the Herskovits Library’s holdings, spanning from the 1860s, when photography was a fledgling technology, to the present day. Several document Africa’s critical mid-twentieth-century period, notably the E. H. Duckworth Photographic Archive, which includes over five thousand photographs taken by a range of photographers for the publication Nigeria Magazine; the Vernon McKay Photographs: 1,500plus images taken by the diplomat and Northwestern alumnus documenting daily life across Africa; and the Ifeoma Onyefulu Photographs, comprising forty-nine images, many portraits of women, by the Nigerian author and professional photographer. Undergirding these is a sizable holding of colonial-era photographs, with at its core the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, 1860–1960, which includes over seven thousand colonial-era photographs, many mounted within photo albums.

Kader Attia’s engagement with Northwestern grew out of the desire among curators at the Block Museum and the Herskovits Library to engage with the photographs and photo albums in the Library’s collection. The holdings

raised questions about how a campus art museum can responsibly present such freighted, and often fraught, images and objects in a way that takes account of and invites reflection on their complex content. These images and objects require careful interrogation in order to disentangle their layers of intertwined meanings; needs that a straightforward mode of display would fail to meet. By inviting an artist to undertake this interpretive work, we sought to dig more deeply into the nature of these materials. Art is different than any other human mechanism in its ability to pose knotty questions while providing a means for open-ended reflection and dialogue. We hoped that an artistic project focusing on the Herskovits’s holdings could help us to make these remarkable materials known to campus and community and invite reflection on the layers of meaning embedded in them.

Antawan Byrd, a student in Northwestern’s graduate art history program and the Block Museum’s Graduate Fellow in the 2014–15 academic year, was enlisted to lead this initiative. Byrd is deeply engaged with contemporary art on the African continent. After reviewing the Herskovits Library’s vast photographic collections, he proposed that Kader Attia was the ideal artist to engage with these materials and with the wider campus. Attia’s researchbased practice focuses on Africa, particularly during the colonial and postcolonial eras, and recounts the history of twentieth-century global encounters. He likewise investigates archival collections as both subjects and as art objects in and of themselves. Two of Attia’s seminal works, each incorporating archival research as well as intercultural connections, underscored for us that he was the perfect artist for the Herskovits Library project.

In his 2013 installation for Whitechapel Gallery, Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder (figure 2) Attia created a cabinet of curiosities featuring 19th and 20th century artifacts, such as illustrations from natural history texts and scientific instruments including a microscope, telescope, and specimen drawers. These are surrounded by shelves filled with books, magazines, and newspapers of the same period. A mirror on the ceiling of the installation infinitely extends the visual space. The work sought to interrogate the way knowledge

Figure 1.

The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, 2012, Installation view dOCUMENTA (13), at Fridericianum, Kassel, 2012, Photo: Roman März & Kader Attia

has been constructed, categorized, and institutionalized, especially during the colonial period. In his acclaimed 2012 installation for Documenta 13, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, Attia projected photographs of European soldiers wounded in World War I who were subsequently the subjects of emerging plastic surgery techniques (figure 1). He juxtaposed these images with photographs of Africans with body modifications and African sculptural objects with exposed breaks and repairs, raising questions about how Western and African cultures have responded to injury and healing, whether of individuals or societies. In this installation, Attia asks us to consider what we can learn from the legacies of the twentieth-century, from colonialism to world wars, by presenting divergent approaches to healing from these traumas, a process he calls “repair.”

In these works and others Attia employs a critical eye as he navigates between research and a self-reflexive consideration of the construction of knowledge, between sifting through ordinary documents and investigating the very foundation upon which such archives are constituted, particularly the way in which the legacies of Western colonialism have shaped archival practices and knowledge itself. In a 2014 interview with Léa Gauthier, Attia stated, “Gathering archives or objects corresponds to an artistic exercise I’ve been developing for several

years now as a way to get people to think. Images, written documents, or objects have intense relation to the archive due to their ambiguity. Michel Foucault warns us with the famous quote that still haunts me: ‘The archive stands as an authority, it shows what it wants to, and as a result, conceals what it does not show.’” 1 During his visits to Northwestern, Attia conducted an immersive exploration of the Herskovits Library’s photography collection before moving on to a sweeping survey of its books, periodicals, and loose files. As the final stage of his process, he held conversations with faculty and staff across many academic fields. His research ranged across topics including Africa’s modern and traditional architecture; art criticism; psychology and medicine; prosthetics; and water. He pulled hundreds of objects to peruse and scan, involving library and museum staff, as well as student research assistants. Discussions with faculty specialists covered subjects including the science of phantom limbs and mirror neurons, the making of smart prosthetics, and the wounds of colonialism, genocide, racism, and slavery. While some of Attia’s research at Northwestern is traceable in the works included in the Block’s exhibition, other facets of his work here will likely enrich his artistic practice for years to come.

1. Léa Gauthier, “Interview with Léa Gauthier ” in Repair, edited by Kader Attia, Paris: Blackjack éditions, 2014, pp. 180-181.

Figure 2.

Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder (2013). Installation view at Whitechapel Gallery. Photo credit: Stephen White

In a January 2017 article for the online magazine Artnet, the critic Chrisian Viveros-Fauné declared, “Kader Attia is having an Art World Moment.”2 Among his international accomplishments he received the 2016 Marcel Duchamp Prize, for which he debuted the film Reflecting Memory at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. This important film, in which Attia’s thinking about trauma and repair unfold among images and interviews that merge personal experiences of amputation and societal experiences of colonialism, genocide, and slavery, was among the works commissioned by the Block Museum and features interviews with members of Northwestern University’s faculty. This was followed in the fall of 2017 with the Joan Miró Prize.

This publication presents perspectives on the work Kader Attia did with the Block Museum, the Herskovits Library, and Northwestern University faculty leading to the exhibition Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory. Antawan Byrd summarizes the conversation that he moderated during the opening day program between Attia and faculty from Northwestern’s Department of Anthropology, Peter Locke and Caroline Bledsoe. An interview with Esmeralda Kale, George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator of the Herskovits

Library, highlights the library’s motivations for engaging Attia, their experience assisting his research process, and their response to his work. A series of photographs capture some of the printed resources from the Herskovits collection that inspired Attia. Also included are installation photographs of the Block Museum’s exhibition.

Emerging from Attia’s multifaceted engagement with the Block Museum and Northwestern University, Reflecting Memory included works that were born out of a wide-ranging inquiry that unfolded over several years as part of his ongoing intellectual and artistic project. Compositionally, the exhibition comprised three movements—in collage, sculpture, and video, presented in a gallery divided into three parts. Memory, as expressed through the evocation of what is lost through what remains and the conjuring of the past in the present, permeated the exhibition, as Attia explored its connections to the interrelated ideas of mirroring, the phantom limb, and repair.3 Additionally, the artist drew upon a constellation of disciplinary practices, ranging from neurobiology and biomedical engineering to anthropology, African studies, and architectural history, to engage the diverse connotations of healing and of trauma.

2. Christian Viveros-Fauné “Why Artist Kader Attia is having an Art World Moment.” Artnet, Jan. 27 2017. Link here

Attia conceived the spare exhibition design in order to give significant weight to each of the five works on view. A trio of minimal untitled collages made up the first movement of the exhibition (figure 3). Developed out of Attia’s extensive archival research into the relationship between traditional African and European modernist architectures, the collages included elements spliced from historical sources recombined into new wholes, evoking ideas about the construction of the archive and the status of architectural ruins in relationship to the “repairing” of history’s fissures and omissions. For example, in one of the collages, Attia juxtaposed a scene of the modernist architect Le Corbusier lecturing to colleagues with a colonial-era photograph of the Northeastern Algerian village of Bouzina and modernist building projects that echo the architecture from Bouzina. In another, an excerpt from a French journal article depicting the entrance to the Moroccan Pavilion at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition becomes a signifier of the direct tie between European and North African aesthetics and an anchor for playful reflection on the forms of modernist architecture and design.

The second movement consisted of an untitled sculpture constructed of bifurcated found objects optically reconstituted within the reflection of a mirrored stainlesssteel panel (figure 4 and 5). Here Attia invoked the idea of repair in concrete and visceral ways. Viewers interacting with the sculpture had the experience of the sculpture reflecting an image of themselves that was different than what they felt their bodies to be. The operational logic of the sculpture was echoed in the final work of the exhibition, the forty-minute filmic essay Reflecting Memory. The film interweaves footage of interviews with experts in the fields of anthropology, art history, neurobiology, and prosthetics, among others, with evocatively composed silent tableaux vivant. The relationships between these vignettes and the interview footage are slowly revealed, as the camera presents different angles of the bodies of the sitters included in the vignettes, to finally disclose that they are amputees.

Figure 3. Untitled, 2016, Collage on cardboard: page from a periodical, and scanned and printed photographs. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

3. For more on the film Reflecting Memory see Clémentine Deliss, “Kader Attia: the Phantom Limb in Art” in Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory. Prato, Italy: Gli Oro, 2016. Link here

The exhibition extends Attia’s ongoing exploration of the concept of repair. This wide-reaching but nuanced term describes the work that is done to fix wounds on multiple registers, from the broken object to the injured individual and the traumatized society. The collective and connected traumas of colonialism, slavery, and genocide have long occupied Attia, and he returned to these subjects in this exhibition. The sites at which these traumas occur— the object, the individual, the society, the physical, the psychological, the historical—are not mutually exclusive but rather inform, inflect, and reflect upon each other. Important to Attia’s understanding of repair is maintaining the continued visibility of the original wound, like a scar signaling where an injury has occurred. This is reflected, for example, in the aforementioned work The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (figure 1), which incorporates images and objects related to the gueules cassées, or “broken faces,” and mended African sculptures. In these cases, the reparative processes did not completely erase evidence of injuries, but rather incorporated them.

Among the many subjects Attia discussed with Northwestern faculty was the topic of mirror neurons, a type of brain cell that responds in the same way whether an individual is performing an action or witnessing someone else perform the same action. Researchers have explored possible connections between these neurons and our capacities to learn through mimicry as well as feel empathy. The question of empathy, particularly the ability—or inability—to connect to a trauma one has not experienced personally, presents an ethical concern that is an implicit subject of the works in the exhibition and is integral to the way they operate. Mirrors are sometimes used as part of the therapeutic process for recent amputees. As a motif within the exhibition, mirroring holds all of these connotations and plays them off of each other. The exhibition Reflecting Memory provokes our associative contemplation of trauma, healing, the reoccurring experience of loss, the constitution and reconstitution of history, and repair, in Attia’s sense, on the individual and collective levels.

In a 2017 interview Attia expressed his desire to explore the “similarity between the after effects of amputation and the loss of a large part of [a] population following a historical catastrophe.”5 One such after effect of amputation is the phantom limb, a neurological phenomenon in which an amputee experiences the sensation, often painful, that a missing limb is still attached to the body. In the works presented in Reflecting Memory, Attia engaged both the literal sense of the phantom limb as well as its metaphorical possibilities.

In the collages, sculpture, and video, Attia invokes amputation in reference to the individual body and the societal body. The film, for example, features people living with amputated limbs and also addresses the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Attia extends the concept to other types of absences, such as the absences in an archive, when aspects of history are unaccounted for or not incorporated. He evokes this metaphorical interpretation in the collages, specifically their allusions to the fragmented remains of history.

4. Gueules cassées is the French term used for World War I veterans whose faces were deformed as a result of injuries sus tained in battle. For a recent treatment of this subject. see Marjorie Gerhardt. The Men with Broken Faces: gueules cassées of the First World War. New York: Oxford, 2015, see Léa Gauthier, editor, Kader Attia: RepaiR. Paris: Blackjack Editions, 2014 5. Juliet Helmke, “Contradictory Truths: Attia’s Video Dialogues at Lehmann Maupin.” Blouin Art Info. January 18, 2017. Link here

Figure 4 & 5. Untitled, 2016, Desk, typewriter, mirrored stainless steel. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Figure 6. Kader Attia addresses audiences at the Northwestern University Library.

ON THE OPENING OF REFLECTING MEMORY Antawan I. Byrd, PhD Candidate, Art History, Northwestern University In the fall of 2014, I traveled from Chicago to New York to see Show Your Injuries, a two-part exhibition of work

by Kader Attia presented in Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea and Lower East Side galleries. The trip occurred at the very early stages of planning for Attia’s research and exhibition at Northwestern, and was thus geared toward getting acquainted with the types of formal problems and socio-political concerns the artist might bring to his engagements with Northwestern faculty and the archives of the Herskovits Library of African studies. While several objects from Show Your Injuries held my attention, it was the installation Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014) that most swayed me (figure 7). This is partly because the work’s incorporation of megaphones resonated with my abiding interests in the relationship between political debate and loudspeaker technologies. Because I had the work in mind three years later in the days leading up to the opening ceremony and public program for Reflecting Memory, I want to return to this installation as I offer some brief reflections on the tone and discussion of that day’s event.

Asesinos! Asesinos! gathers more than one hundred wooden doors that have been split in half vertically and reassembled into A-frame structures, many of which have handheld megaphones mounted at the top. The reconfigured doors stood without support, packed tightly into a recessed space on the lower level of Lehman Maupin’s now-defunct Chrystie street location. The confined arrangement of the structures, the presence of amplification technologies, and the A-frame’s perennial associations with street signage, all brought to mind an image of bodies gathered shoulder to shoulder in protest.

This impression was heightened by the indicting tone of the work’s Spanish title: Asesinos! Asesinos!, or “Murderer!

Murderer!” While the exclamatory title drives home the work’s association with grievance, it is worth noting that the loudspeakers were muted. The devices call attention to speech on a symbolic level, but their inoperable nature seemed to underscore the installation’s silence and the ambiguous subject of the title’s accusatory address.

The motivation of Asesinos! Asesinos!’s thus feels both pointed yet decidedly open; its signaling of unified action in the face of violence is as much about redress as it is about anticipation. It is this convergence of time, of past and future, that returned me to thinking about the installation in the days preceding the opening of Attia’s Block exhibition. On the morning of Saturday, January 21, 2017 as visitors filled the Block Museum’s Pick-Laudati

Auditorium to capacity for Attia’s opening event, millions of people across America and throughout the world crowded streets in protests in response to the previous day’s inauguration of Donald J. Trump as America’s fortyfifth President. Given that the show’s public program would focus on work about bodily destruction and trauma —among the very issues informing the demonstrations — my encounter with Asesinos! Asesinos! felt all the more potent, if not prescient.

In Chicago alone, an estimated 250,000 protestors converged downtown for the Women’s March, advocating for intersectional awareness and progress on farreaching issues including abortion rights, voting rights, racial and gender equality, immigration reform, and the protection of civil liberties more broadly. An image from the demonstration taken by Chicago Tribune photographer Nancy Stone recalls Attia’s Asesinos! Asesinos! in its foregrounding of a megaphone held by an activist (figure 8). The artwork and documentary photograph each point to how the relationship between the aesthetic and the political are negotiated in and between a constellation of sites including, but not limited to, the gallery and the street. Block Museum director Lisa Corrin’s opening remarks touched upon this relationship, for in setting the tone for the day she obliquely linked the distressing political climate in the country to recurring themes in Attia’s exhibition: “Trauma and repair, you will be hearing these words a lot today—but not just in the museum but on the news, at kitchen tables, in classrooms, and coffeehouses.” She continued by acknowledging how contemporary art, and the spaces that display it, have the potential to shape our collective and individual consciousness of and responses to historic upheavals: The traumas of violent, historic events are indelibly impressed upon those who suffer them, those who bear witness and those who reflect on them as historians and artists. They become inseparable from the collective psyche of a community and of a civilization. Is not the role of a museum to provide a space for such critical reflections?

For art to become part of, as much as to reflect, our shared experiences? The museum provides the mirror, or better still, enables the artist to do so.

Figure 7. Installation view of Asesinos ! Asesinos ! (2014). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

In many ways, the conversations that followed Corrin’s comments modeled the capacity of museums to operate as spaces of reflection and demystification. The program provided the audience—composed of students, faculty, and members of the broader Evanston/Chicago community—the opportunity to learn about Attia’s exhibition, including the ways it grew out of research in the Herskovits Library and modeled the numerous conversations Attia had with faculty members.

The focal point of the day was a panel discussion, which I moderated, that explored Attia’s campus research and exhibition. The interlocutors included the artist, two of his Northwestern collaborators, Caroline Bledsoe and Peter Locke, faculty members in Anthropology and Global Health Studies, respectfully, and the audience. I began the discussion by asking Attia about his experiences in the Herskovits library. The wealth of materials in the Herskovits library—ranging from posters, newspapers, artist books, medical journals, and colonial-era photography collections—constituted important forms of contact for Attia as they inspired new areas of inquiry and perspectives on ideas and problems already central to his research.

Figure 1

The artist referenced several objects that Herskovits Curator Esmeralda Kale shared with him, and he connected these objects to broader concerns resonant in Reflecting Memory: I had several moments in this research that I will never forget. [One] example leads us to what I’m trying to say in this exhibition with this film. I have to say that I was struck by some major photographs, old photographs, some of them are [stereographs] representing slaves in Tanzania (figure 9). And what is absolutely fascinating with these documents is that…you don’t [really] see anything. You just see the truss, the trusses of these slaves. You just know that they are slaves because [of] the caption that is written [on the photographs], probably, if I remember, from [ca.] 1865. The caption says, “This is a slave market.” I think this leads to, and we will have time to talk later about this, what I call the phantom limb, the thing that is still here but we don’t see it.

Attia’s sixty-minute filmic essay, which shares the exhibition’s title, lays out the artist’s process of elaborating preexisting conceptual and methodological interests in response to conversations with faculty and research on campus. The film presents intersecting reflections on and analyses of catastrophic historical events such as slavery, colonialism, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust.

The neurological phenomenon known as a phantom limb describes the often-painful experience in which amputees sense that missing limbs are still attached to their bodies.

Recalling the faded and phantom presence of slaves in the nineteenth-century photographs Attia studied in the Herskovits Library, the concept encapsulates how the lingering presence of past traumas manifests through pain, even if such traumas are overlooked or appear less visible with the passing of time. The difficulty of healing and coming to terms with the past is laid bare in the film.

Attia splices together commentary from a DJ, a dancer, psychoanalysts, surgeons, neurobiologists, and a range of scholars and historians, all of whom address the connection between memory and repair in understanding the past.

During his visits to campus, Attia recorded hour-long conversations on these subjects with faculty members in departments ranging from anthropology to molecular engineering, and included excerpts of conversations with Professors Huey Copeland (Art History) and Harvey Young (Performance Studies) in the film.

Figure 8.

Both Bledsoe and Locke, were interviewed during his research, and during the panel discussion they shared their responses to different aspects of Attia’s work. Bledsoe offered her take on the artist’s recurring attention to “memory” and “repair” by questioning how memories are developed and mobilized, and how, for her, other terms might best describe efforts to cope with and respond to trauma: I’m going to speak about part of my debate with Kader… so when we talk about memory, my question is, which memories? Part of the conversation that we’re always having with each other and with ourselves, is kind of spinning memories, and reworking memories and so on, but we have to choose. We are very selective in which [memories] we choose and in what we do with them. So I see this in some ways as part of what I see in Kader’s work, and I keep thinking the more he uses the word, “repair,” I keep thinking “riposte,” you know, “response” in a kind of active way that says... “I’m not going to just sit back and take this,” right? But whether we think about the colonial literature, or the events going on now, or anything, we’re -even as we spin memories that aren’t [ours], we’re usually formulating responses, riposte, you know? “Next time I see that person, I’m going to say this,” or, “If I had just said that,” or something. So we’re creating as -- we’re almost agents ourselves in reworking memory...and forming a new person, perhaps as part of the healing process, perhaps as revenge…

Women’s March, Chicago, 2017. Photograph by Nancy L. Stone / Chicago Tribune

Figure 9. “Scrapbook: Pictures of people and places at home and abroad. African and other Photographs,” 1860s -1870s. Includes stereoscope images (many faded) of slave markets in Zanzibar taken and annotated by the explorer James A. Grant. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University.

At another point during the discussion, Locke brought up his time in Sarajevo researching the reconstruction of Bosnia following its collapse in the early 1990s. For Locke, this experience prompted a range of thoughts on how societies recover from the trauma of war and thus provides points of intersection with the events discussed

by Attia’s interlocutors in the film:

And I think, you know, we see how dangerous that idea can become on a political and a collective scale when there’s a longing for a lost time that is mythologized, that is idealized. There’s a power in touching the traumatic wound and touching the traumatic memory in a certain kind of way that we can see now is boundless in both, perhaps, the healing that it can initiate or the damage that it can do.

I don’t think that in extended mourning or melancholic relationships to memory there’s necessarily a pathology there. Those are just the materials out of which a community that has experienced something harrowing has to make a new world rather than necessarily restoring the old one. So there can be this paradox of repair that I think we see really powerfully in Kader’s film, and that I saw in Sarajevo, that their connection or their engagement with their memory of an idealized Sarajevan past of cosmopolitanism...furnished them with the resources to critique their post-war present…This was memory work in the service of social critique in the service of understanding the circumstances into which [Sarajevans] were thrown, rather than a simple representation of a pure truth of the past, which, of course, we know there’s not really access to or limited access to. So on the one hand, memory furnishes [Sarajevans] with this empowerment, but on the other hand it keeps them stuck because it connects them to this idea that what has been lost can be restored somehow in the new politics.

As suggested by these excerpts, I was struck at many moments during the conversation by how the backand-forth managed to extend the very forms of dialogue that informed the making of the works in the exhibition, particularly the film. This sense of elaboration followed past the conclusion of the program, as many audience members, continued to engage notions of trauma and repair by heading to downtown Chicago to participate in the Women’s March.

Figure 10. Viewers admire Kader Attia’s Untitled, 2016, collage on cardboard: page from a periodical, scanned and printed photographs, and corrugated cardboard.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

INTERVIEW: THE ARTIST AND THE ARCHIVE Esmeralda Kale, George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

The invitation to Kader Attia to work on a project at Northwestern University came about because of a shared desire on the part of the Block Museum of Art and the University Library to connect a contemporary artist with the unparalleled collections of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. Esmeralda Kale, the George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator of the Herskovits Library and her team committed to making the library’s collection as accessible as possible and to exploring new terrain for promoting its relevancy. In this interview, conducted on November 3, 2017, several months after the close of Attia’s Reflecting Memory exhibition, Kale reflects upon the process of hosting Attia with the Block Museum’s Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, Kathleen Bickford Berzock.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Block Museum of Art: Can you tell us a little bit about the scope of the Herskovits Library?

I know it’s described as the largest Africana collection outside of the continent of Africa. What does that mean?

Esmeralda Kale, George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies: Yes, we do say we’re the largest Africana collection outside of Africa. We have been collecting since 1954. Our earliest materials come from the 1400s, and we are not only collecting what is currently being published, but we’re also collecting anything that comes on the market that is historical.

We have a large collection from the 1400s, and there are materials that are much older that we are acquiring right now. We acquire in all subjects, from literature to science to engineering to business. We collect in all formats, from slides and film to posters and newspapers. All of that falls within our domain. We also collect commemorative cloth and ephemera that we feel will help add to the conversation that our students are developing and thinking about when it comes to Africa. We zero in on certain things, for instance, the Obama presidency, when Africa was really, really excited about his presidency and

produced all sorts of things; or the first World Cup on African soil; we collected posters and T-shirts and all that sort of material.

Berzock: You also, of course, have books about Africa written by individuals both based on the African continent and beyond, and books in many different languages.

Kale: We make an effort to collect from the continent of Africa, so things that have been published and written in Africa, and things that have been published and written outside of Africa fall into this collection. We want to understand the conversation on both sides. What Africans are saying about themselves, what Africans in the Diaspora are writing about themselves, and what other people are writing about Africa; we feel it’s all relevant to the conversation.

Berzock: Turning to Kader Attia—we at the Block Museum were excited about creating a connection between Kader Attia and the Herskovits Library because Kader’s work focuses on histories that are very much engaged with the history of Africa, including the history of colonialism and the history of architecture. He is of Algerian heritage, and very often he works on the African continent. He has a studio in Senegal, and he has worked extensively in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere on the African continent.

As an artist, he is engaged the archive and the library as a place and a resource. He’s done projects in other collections and libraries—for instance, at the National Museum of African Art, where he had a fellowship at one time. Given the importance of the Herskovits Library, in terms of the way that it collects and focuses on Africa, we thought it would be amazing to bring Kader Attia together with the Herskovits Library.

We were super excited when the Herskovits was game to do that, and so let’s talk a little bit about that experience.

First, what was it like to host Kader Attia?

Kale: To be honest, when we agreed to host him, I must

say we had no idea what that would involve. We’ve never worked with an artist, I’ve never worked with an artist, so I really don’t know what is involved in terms of practice, in terms of what they would be interested in.

And, so, initially his first visit was very much a look at our visual collection: our photographs, our artist books, and that made sense to me. We’re a small staff, and I think we were all surprised by the quantity and the speed, the voraciousness at which he gets through things you present, and, you know, he not only gets through them, but he identifies things that are going to be useful to him.

And that was slightly frightening.

It was a bit daunting because you think, “Okay, what are we going to show him next? What are we going to show him?

He’s here for X amount of days and we need to provide him

Figure 11. Esmeralda Kale and Kader Attia explore the Herskovits collection

with something that is going to be meaningful to him, and we want him to maximize his time here.”

I know it was clearly outlined, but for some strange reason it didn’t seem to register that he would have read so much. I mean, he so pointedly read on these subjects that as you put forth stuff, he’d say, “Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with this.” And [he would] actually go in and start looking at sections [of books] and talking to you about sections that have really resonated with him, and that he’s using as part of his practice. So, that was an eye opener for us…but, then, in some ways, it was a challenge because we really need to dig deeper and start identifying things that have not been catalogued and not highly visible, but we think fall under some of the subjects that we think are of interest to him.

Figure 12. Esmeralda Kale introduces Kader Attia’s research to the Northwestern community.

Berzock: So he started out with the photography collection, and could you just share a little bit about the scope of the photography collection specifically?

Kale: We have several albums that we’ve collected over the years. Actually, my predecessor, David Easterbrook, was extremely interested in documenting history through photographs, and spent his time at Northwestern really developing those collections, For example, the Winterton Collection 1860 to 1960.

Just one collection, our biggest collection, has 73 albums and 7,000 images. Kader Attia looked at every album.

And, then, in addition to that, just before David retired three years ago, we acquired the Duckworth Collection.

The Duckworth Collection was assembled by a gentleman who had worked in Nigeria from the 1950s up until the 1970s, so you see Nigeria through the end of the colonial era right up into the dawn of independence, into that first phase of self-governance; and a lot of those images are being taken by young Nigerians, young Nigerian photographers that Duckworth trained. And a lot of these images are going into this publication that Duckworth edited called Nigerian Magazine. Kader also looked at many of these images. I think he managed to get through, if not all of them, half of them. These are the two large

Figure 13. Esmeralda Kale and Kader Attia discuss the artist’s Untitled (Ghardaïa), 2009

collections. In addition to that, Kader looked at individual albums that we have within the collection.

Berzock: And so, for his second visit, he focused more on publications. And he identified a number of themes that included water. But it could be water as a resource, it could be water in ritual life or belief, it could be water used in pottery, it could be water and technology, it could be water in any facet. Another was medicine—specifically, amputations and prosthetics. And then a third was psychology and psychiatry and the idea of the phantom limb as it could be explained through science…and through other forms of belief, and colonial and modernist architecture. Do you remember other ones that were particularly challenging?

Kale: Yes, yes. The psychology, I thought, was fascinating because to be honest, that was not anything I thought he would think of.

To me, the water made sense, and the architecture, but when he got into prosthetics and medicine and psychology, I at that point thought, “Wow, it’s anything.”

And I remember we stumbled upon a whole run of this journal…I wouldn’t say we stumbled upon it, I didn’t think he’d be interested in it

Figure 14. Untitled, 2016, Collage on cardboard: photographic illustration from a book. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Berzock: And he was super excited about it.

Kale: Yes. Berzock: It was a psychology or a psychoanalysis journal, published in Senegal.

Kale: And he had never seen the entire run in one place.

Berzock: And I think that also was a pivotal moment for Kader because he realized even more deeply how amazing the Herskovits Library collection is, maybe the only library outside of Dakar that has the entire run of this pivotal journal.

Kale: Yes. And then a striking moment for me was that we had had this poster, it was on the board, it had been in the department since I arrived, and I really wasn’t sure why we even had it; and so it hadn’t been processed, it was just sort of going from pillar to post in this room. And we had

identified a room for Kader to work in, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll just take this poster and put it on top of a bookcase.”

Well, he walks into the room and he immediately looks at it and he says, “I just did an installation on this.” Here he is, just making connections as soon as he walks in, and it was powerful for us.1 Berzock: Why did the Herskovits Library want to work with an artist?

Kale: Well, we wanted to work with an artist because we had never done it before. We thought it was an opportunity, and I was interested to see what would come out of his work. What would develop? What would inspire him and what would he create? You’d already identified an artist, and I thought, “Well, you know, half the work has already been done, all we have to do is be supportive.” And I thought, “Well, we can manage that, so let’s see what in this collection will inspire someone to do.”

1. The poster was a map of the Algerian city of Ghardaïa, about which Attia created the work Untitled (Ghardaïa), 2009, see figure 13.

Berzock: So in retrospect, what did the library get out of it?

Kale: I think it has allowed us to see ourselves in a completely different way. It has allowed us to see ourselves as having a completely different audience, completely different users that we might never have identified. I think it has in some ways raised our visibility with a brand new audience that we might never have come across. But I think it also has provided me, as a curator, the opportunity to look for the more unusual.

Berzock: What would that look like?

Kale: As I travel now, I think “I’d like to show that to Kathleen. I wonder if my colleagues at the Block would be interested in this.”

Berzock: That’s great.

Berzock: So were there things that surprised you about the experience?

Kale: The whole experience surprised me. Really. The whole thing. I think it surprised all of us. I remember one day just being here with another member of the staff who hadn’t really been involved the whole week, and I said to her, “It’s Friday and Kader is here over the weekend and he doesn’t have anything new.”

And she was, like, “Esmeralda, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I said, “Okay, so come with me, let’s go into the room, let me show you because I can’t explain it, you have to see it.”

And we went into the workroom, and there were the items we had pulled for him, and you could see that everything he had looked at had a note in it. You could visually see all these yellow notes; and she said, “Oh, I understand now.”

So it was like, “Okay, so now let’s just get to it and get him at least two trucks of stuff because he’s here Saturday and Sunday and he needs to be able to look at things.”

What I found also interesting was you think somebody approaches the work as one project at a time, and while he was here, I understood that, no, he wasn’t really working on one project. In his mind, he was working on several things. And the possibility of things that maybe he hadn’t even properly developed.

Berzock: Right. That struck me, too, you know, that the work that he did here will inform his work and his practice for many years to come, and I think that is one of the most beautiful and satisfying things about it is that his experience in the Herskovits Library and here at Northwestern is going to have an impact on his career for a long time to come. That doesn’t stop with the end of our project with him.

Kale: Right.

Berzock: So we were kind of feeding his practice in a really profound way.

Kale: Yes. And that, at the end of it, really made sense to me.

Berzock: So Kader produced the film Reflecting Memory as well as several collages and a sculpture that we presented at the Block Museum as an exhibition following his work here. What did you and the other staff members at the library think of the work that was produced from the process?

Kale: Now that’s an interesting question because I looked at his work before he arrived to get an idea of what the possibilities could be. But I was completely surprised, I was completely, completely surprised; and I think all of us were surprised because it wasn’t anything that we could have anticipated. And I think all of my staff walked away with that, as in, “Wow, we didn’t know that was possible.”

Berzock: So, do you have any last thoughts or reflections on the experience that you want to share? Would you do it again?

Kale: Yeah, we would, because somehow, I think, he was the most challenging; and I think, because we could meet that challenge, anything else would be easier. It was a nice litmus test for us. Yeah, so we would welcome it.

Figure 15.

Kader Attia speaks with a visitor to the exhibition. Image copyright Sean Su Photography,

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST Untitled, 2016 Collage on cardboard: photographic illustration from a book Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Untitled, 2016 Collage on cardboard: page from a periodical, scanned and printed photographs, and corrugated cardboard Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Untitled, 2016 Collage on cardboard: page from a periodical, and scanned and printed photographs Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Untitled, 2016 Desk, typewriter, mirrored stainless steel Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Reflecting Memory, 2016 40 minutes, HD film, screened on a continuous loop Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano

Figure 16. Still from Reflecting Memory, 2016, 40 minutes, HD film, screen

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Galeri

ned on a continuous loop.

ie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory was organized by the Block Museum in partnership with the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The curatorial team included Block curators Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Janet Dees, and Antawan I. Byrd, PhD candidate in Art History. Support for the exhibition has been provided by the Myers Foundations, the Diane and Craig Solomon Contemporary Art Fund, the Alsdorf Gallery at the Block Museum Endowment Fund, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Thanks to the following campus partners who have generously contributed to this project: Department of Anthropology: Caroline Bledsoe, Peter Locke, Jessica R. Winegar Department of Art History: Huey Copeland, Hannah Feldman, Krista Thompson Department of Art Theory & Practice: Iùigo Manglano-Ovalle, Michael J. Rakowitz Herskovits Library of African Studies: David Easterbrook, Esmeralda Kale, Gene Kannenberg Jr., Crystal Martin Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities: Thomas S. Burke, Wendy L. Wall Department of Neurobiology: Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, David McLean Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago: Todd Kuiken, John Spanias Department of Theatre: Harvey Young Department of Performance Studies: D. Soyini Madison Middle East & North African Studies: Brian T. Edwards Program of African Studies: Will Reno University Library: Curtis Anthony Bozif, Kevin B. Leonard, Thomas O’Connell, Shelby Silvernell, Daniel A. Zellner The staff of the Block Museum of Art