A resplendent display of 272 fuchsia-colored paper lotus lanterns adorns the light-filled oculus on The Rubin Museum of Art's top floor. The sweeping circular installation, Lotus: Zone of Zero (2019) by Kimsooja, is among the more striking of the works by 10 international artists selected by guest curator Sara Raza for the exhibition Clapping...

In the first week of June, Britain and France played host to a vast spectacle on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The commemoration events, tracing the timetable of the Normandy landings as they unfolded three quarters of a century earlier, marshalled a range of techniques, ancient and modern, to mark the occasion: church services, parades...

LONDON — A cluster of snails are glued, like barnacles on a ship, to a disused metal post, which stands in a field of dry grass, a shabby apartment block looming in the background. In the photograph, Snails (2009) by French artist Kader Attia, the molluscs are not a culinary delicacy served on a platter with garlic butter, but a symbol of...

In 2009, when Kader Attia visited Picasso and the Masters at Paris's Grand Palais, he was surprised to find that the show included works by Caravaggio, El Greco and Cézanne, yet made no mention of the African art that inspired Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907). His response was to dig out a mask he'd found in a Dakar market and cover it with...

Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory began when Northwestern University's Block Museum extended an invitation to the French-Algerian artist to use the resources of the school's Herskovits Library of African Studies in the spring of 2015. The result was a spare and scholastic exhibition that rewarded the patient viewer with startlingly emotional...

'If the sky is full of stars, then somewhere there is another star, another sun, and around it, there must be other planets... with ground to stand on, water to drink, a breeze, a moon, a decent sea, a sunset poised on the horizon, a sunrise waiting to happen.' So goes a passage from the text of the performance The Necessity of Infinity by Raqs...

Given the current political climate, we here at frieze have been reflecting on the role of art in responding to conflict. With this in mind, we invited a cross-section of artists, curators and writers to answer two deceptively simple questions: ‘How important is art as a form of protest?’ and ‘How effective is it as a conduit of change?’ Responses...

In 2007, the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia created an arresting installation with sculptures of hundreds of disembodied chadors—large pieces of cloth of the kind wrapped around the heads of many Muslim women—rendered in aluminum foil and splayed across a gallery floor. The piece, titled Ghost, tapped several of Attia's recurring...

Water gives life; life needs water. These fundamental realities can easily sound like truisms. But artist Kader Attia managed to invigorate conversations on the subject with renewed environmental and political urgency during the two-day symposium Vive L’Indépendance de L’Eau  ( Long Live the Independence of Water ) that he organized at the...

The Paris-born artist and activist Kader Attia will present the first off-site project of the 13th Sharjah Biennial later this week in Dakar, Senegal, focusing on cultural, political and ecological issues relating to water as a diminishing 21st-century resource.  The event, called Vive l’Indépendance de l’Eau (8-9 January; Université Cheikh...

A collaboration between the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (ADIAF) and the Centre Pompidou, the Prix Marcel Duchamp seeks to bring together the most innovative contemporary artists in France and to encourage new artistic forms. This year, for the first time, all four nominees are exhibiting at the Centre Pompidou....

The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Association pour la Diffusion Internationale de l’Art Français announced today that Kader Attia has won its 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp. The prize is awarded annually to a French artist. This year’s other nominees were Yto Barrada, Ulla von Brandenburg, and Barthélémy Toguo.

The Paris-born artist Kader Attia opens a new, three-storey exhibition and events space today (17 October) in Paris.  The space is a new kind of artistic 'laboratory' for sharing ideas and showing works in the post-Brexit age, he says. The new venue, close to the Gare du Nord train station and co-founded with the restaurateur Zico...

To be curated by Christine Tohmé, the thirteenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial will span five cities—Beirut, Dakar, Istanbul, Ramallah, and Sharjah—for a year of programming.

While the world has its attention trained on ISIS and the traumatic events erupting in the Middle East, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is taking a longer view of the region with its excellent exhibition “But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa,” curated by Sara Raza. It is the third...

Cutting through the noise at Art Basel is easier said than done. The annual fair is famed for its epic proportions and rich seam of talent. So perhaps it was naive of us to ask critics and curators what their favorite artworks were. Naive or not, we did so anyway.  Trapping them on an escalator, we interrogated five of Art...

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s new show, may be a mouthful, but what it purports to accomplish stays relatively straightforward. The final part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, the lyrically-titled exhibition introduces a newly acquired work designed to broaden the scope of the...

On 16 April 2016 the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt opened a solo exhibition of the work of Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia, who investigates the long lasting effects colonialism has had on non-Western culture in tandem with historical and political notions of identity on the continuum, ranging from tradition to modernity.

But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa  is the third iteration of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s UBS Map Global Art Initiative, which has acquired more than 125 works from 37 artists to date following previous focuses on South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. Curated by...

Unlimited, the Art Basel platform allotted for large-scale and unconventional artworks, will be showing a record 88 projects from participating galleries this year. Gianni Jetzer, curator-at-large at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is heading the section for the fifth year in a row.

In her catalogue introduction, Koyo Kouoh calls Ireland “the first and foremost colonial laboratory of the British enterprise.” It’s a striking statement from the curator of EVA International biennial in Limerick. Titling the biennial Still (the) Barbarians, Kouoh uses it as a platform to consider how the legacies of colonialism...

For the sixth Marrakech Biennale, currently on view and titled Quoi De Neuf Là  (a French expression roughly translated as 'What's up?,' but here interpreted as 'Not New Now'), history is as much of a medium and subject matter as much as the Red City itself. Concentrated within Marrakech's central historical sites of...

Algeria’s long history of colonialism and conquest provides complex narratives and fertile ground for contemporary artists who push the boundaries between tradition and modernity, utilising rich media, techniques and performances.

Algeria’s long history of colonialism and conquest provides complex narratives and fertile ground for contemporary artists who push the boundaries between tradition and modernity, utilising rich media, techniques and performances. Algeria is a North African nation situated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara desert. Due to its...

The latest acquisitions by Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, revealed during Abu Dhabi Art on Thursday, help to form a clearer picture of the museum’s vision. It will be a site of “multiple narratives”, says Valerie Hillings, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s curator and manager of cultural affairs. An exciting part of the museum’s...

To celebrate 25 years of adventure, projects, sharing and madness, it is just natural for Galleria Continua to invest in the walls of Centquatre-Paris, with which it has collaborated for several years. Amid constant activity, it is a veritable collaborative platform whose objectives strongly resonate with those of Galleria Continua. The...

The great hall of the world's most influential international art fair might seem like the last place one might find utopia. Indeed, it almost seems antithetical to the art fair environment, as a realm of commercial activity predicated on exclusivity and lavish displays of luxury it is hardly the setting for utopian ideals (unless your idea of...