Melbourne Festival 2017: artist Kader Attia confronts a world in conflict

Celebrated French-Algerian artist Kader Attia suffers from a condition not uncommon among French expats: "Je t'aime, mais non plus", or a love/hate relationship with the country, and more specifically Paris.

"It's nice, of course, the food, the croissants, the quality of life here helps you to be here, otherwise you'd kill yourself," he jokes.

Exhibition vistors examine Kader Attia's The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil, 2013. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Nagel Draxler (Berlin/Cologne); and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

"But you have a level of misery in the streets that is unbelievable. The social and cultural arena is really contrasted, actually."

Since 2008, Attia has been based in Berlin, which appealed for its "roughness". But every couple of months he's back in Paris for a few days at a time – in October last year, he opened a cafe/bar/art space called La Colonie in Paris's bustling, multicultural 10th arrondissement, home to Gare du Nord, Europe's busiest railway station. Attia curates La Colonie's program of guest speakers and "connects people", welcoming academics and like-minded community groups and artists to use the venue as a work hub.

Exhibition vistors with Kader Attia's Untitled 2014, 116 stained glass fragments, metal screw hooks and fluorescent fixtures;courtesy Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann. Collection of the artist.Credit: Anna Kucera

"We lend them space for free but what we want is when they are ready to start the project they have to share it in a conference or something with the public," says Attia. The September program at La Colonie includes talks on Afrofuturism, the Bristolian arts scene and climate change.

He says he would find it frustrating to only be presenting artworks.

"I'm not saying it's not interesting, but I want to transmit something in the emergency of the world we're living in."

Attia's work favours inciting action over mere representation. This month, the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art presents a retrospective of some of his best-known works, including 2007's Ghost, with its 102 hollow foil casts of Muslim women in prayer. In J'Accuse, black and white footage of soldiers disfigured in WWI faces off with their simulacra: wooden masks carved by Senegalese craftsman, complete with deep scars.

Kader Attia's J'Accuse 2016 teak, steel rebar, single-channel digital video, projection, colour, sound dimensions variable courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, (Berlin/Cologne).

"J'Accuse is an artwork that aims to remind the audience, hey, we just had two hells last century, and we might want to think about that," Attia says.

Since the '90s Attia has been particularly fascinated with the idea of repair and its myriad associations and meanings.

Kader Attia, Ghost 2007/2017 aluminium foil sculptures. Collection: Centre Pompidou, Paris courtesy the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler (Berlin/Cologne) Credit: Anna Kucera

He compares how a china cup might be repaired in Japan, with the fault lines painted in gold, to Western societies where invisible glue might be used or the cup consigned to the rubbish.

"On one hand you have traditional repair, the way old traditional societies in Africa or Europe repair things; on the other hand you have Western modern repair, where you remove the injury by returning the object to its original form," he says.

Artist Kader Attia, whose work features in a retrospective at ACCA.Credit: Michael Danner

It's the difference between accepting and even embracing breaks or scars as part of an object's history, or obliterating the past.

Attia's 2016 work Reflecting Memory, a 48-minute film that is also showing at ACCA, explores repair through "phantom limbs", or the phenomenon among amputees of feeling pain in the absent limb – a feeling perhaps linked with the psychological pain of the loss. The film includes interviews with amputees and surgeons; Attia used strategically placed mirrors to give the illusion that missing limbs had been reinstated. The work compares the distress of amputation to other collective, cumulative psychological traumas, such as genocide and colonialism.

Viewers take in the glow of Kader Attia's Untitled (2016).

The work won France's highest art award last year, the Marcel Duchamp prize, a win that was as surprising to Attia as it was to some of his peers.

"They said, 'Kader, why such a long film, the French don't go to museum to watch film, they go to cinema, you should have done a sculpture.' This was 10 days after I submitted it, but I thought I could not have done it smaller, but I went and saw it three times [at the Pompidou Centre in Paris] and the people were stuck there in front of it, it's something that crosses gender, race …

Kader Attia's The Culture of Fear: An Invention of Evil tall metal racks act as a showcase for books and periodicals.

"It's nice because I always have the feeling that my work was not acknowledged in France because France has so many problems with the Algerian war," he says.

The Algerian war is one of two big taboos in France, according to Attia, the other being the French persecution of Jews in WWII. The first is particularly close to Attia's heart; the child of Algerian immigrants, he spent his childhood between the outer suburbs of Paris and Algeria.

It was, he says, "very depressing".

"When you go back and forth as a teenager you always feel you have no family, you have no friends," he says. "But it's nice also; I think subconsciously you develop your own universe."

A precocious child, he spent a lot of time reading in the library – works of philosophy and art history that would inform his practice to this day.

He reads four or five books at once – not enough, he says – and holds forth on the rise of fascism, the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Stephen Hawking.

Attia, whose work has shown at MoMA, the Tate, and the Venice Biennale, attended art school in Paris, then studied at the Barcelona University of Fine Arts. During French civilian service in the Congo, he took a series of photographs that culminated in his first solo exhibition in 1996.

Attia's ties to Africa remain strong; he recently curated a symposium on water consumption in Dakar, Senegal.

"I've been very busy the past few years ... I want to build a bridge between communities," he says.

Kader Attia is at ACCA as part of the Melbourne Festival from September 30 - November 19. festival.melbourne/2017/events/kader-attia