Outset Netherlands supports Kader Attia's project The Culture of Fear: a Construction of Evil at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. The Culture of Fear: a Construction of Evil was a project in which Attia observed the construction of evil through the unfolding of the colonial gaze in the pages of early twentieth-century printed matter. These colonial newspapers were on view at the summer program The World Turned Inside Out at Witte de With. Attia has been commissioned by Witte de With to make a new artwork based on The Culture of Fear for the group exhibition The crime was almost perfect in 2014. Outset Netherlands supported an evening with Attia on 1st August 2013 and a new production for the above mentioned exhibition in 2014.
Witte de With organised the evening on Thursday 1st August 2013 to generate a reinterpretation of Attia’s project and the works on display and to trigger encounters between research and audience. Attia talked about his project and discussed the following question with invited guests writers Lotte Arndt and Ana Teixeira Pinto: "How has the once idealised figure of the wild man (promoted by authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proclaimed that man is naturally good, society corrupts him) turned into an evil counterpart of the Western colonial gaze through the agenda of the newspaper presses of the early 20th century?"
Kader Attia (b. 1970, Dugny) spent his childhood between France and Algeria and currently lives in Berlin. He studied at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD) in Paris. Using his own background that has been defined by several cultures simultaneously, he explores the impact of Western cultural and political capitalism on the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as how this residual strain of struggle and resistance to colonization impacts the mind of any immigrant as a territory. In series of works that employ different materials, symbols and scale, Attia explores questions of community, diversity, belonging and exile and the tangle of identity conflicts in the age of globalisation.
Attia’s work has been widely exhibited at major international institutions including the ICA, Boston (2007), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011), the Tate Modern, London (2011), MoMA, New York (2012), dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013).
