Kader Attia’s Museum of Emotion Hayward Gallery, London, 2019

This paper comprises a review of The Museum of Emotion, an exhibition of works by the French-Algerian artist, Kader Attia, which was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, February–May 2019. The show charted Attia’s interdisciplinary practice from the past two decades, which has dealt broadly with transnational histories of colonialism, violence, oppression and dispossession. As the Museum of Emotion demonstrated, in Attia’s works these histories are not confined to the past. Instead, they continue to resonate through scars and wounds that in their visibility come to denote the simultaneous absence and presence of the violence of their origination. By focusing on one room within this exhibition, this paper draws analogies between the paradoxical status of the scar in Attia’s work and Jacques Derrida’s notion of writing “under erasure.” In doing so, I outline Attia’s exploration of the potentials and limitations of ‘representation’ and its fraught relationship with lived experience. As I argue, by placing his images “under erasure”, Attia performs a double gesture in recognising the inadequacy of representation for those still living with the legacies of colonialism, whilst still maintaining its fundamental promise to offer what Judith Butler calls the possibility of a “livable life”.

Citation: 
Veal, Clare. “Under erasure: Kader Attia's museum of emotion Hayward Gallery, London, 2019.” Issue 08: Erase, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2019, pp. 59-67.