There are announcements that are received, and there are announcements that are felt. When Jitish Kallat revealed in Venice yesterday that Kader Attia would curate the next edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the room erupted — not in polite applause, but in something closer to recognition. The right name, at exactly the right moment.
Attia is among the most consequential artists working today. Born in 1970 in Dugny, France, to Algerian parents, and formed equally by the suburbs of Paris, Algeria, Congo, and South America, his practice is built upon a single, inexhaustible philosophical proposition: repair. Not repair as restoration, but as revelation — the idea that the act of mending, always incomplete, discloses as much as it conceals.
Drawing from psychoanalysis, anthropology, philosophy, and art history, his work traces the ongoing psychic and physical consequences of colonialism on bodies, built environments, and collective memory. Works such as Ghost (2007) — empty aluminium-foil casts of women in prayer, presence made entirely of absence — and The Museum of Emotion at the Hayward Gallery (2019) exemplify a practice that is simultaneously rigorous and poetic, formal and devastatingly human.
He has exhibited at dOCUMENTA 13, MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim; received the Prix Marcel Duchamp and the Joan Miró Prize; and curated the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022 with characteristically uncompromising focus on artists from the Global South.
Kader Attia with the curator selection committee KMB 2027-28 |
In Venice, speaking with the density of someone who has earned every word, Attia offered something that has stayed with me. Each person, he said, is a library. The same is true of an artist. He spoke of walking into a library once, opening a book of Michelangelo — and that being the whole beginning. Just that: a page, an encounter, an opening.
He spoke of the urgent need for a new critical language — one that looks honestly at the world around us and refuses the inherited vocabularies that no longer suffice. And he spoke of the gaze: not always ocular, he said, but also a body gaze — the experience of walking into the dream of another, of being inhabited by what you witness.
For a biennale rooted in one of the world's oldest trading ports, a crossroads of civilisations and contested histories, there could be no more precise or more searching a mind to hold the curatorial reins. Kochi has found, in Attia, not merely a curator but a philosopher of encounter.
The room erupted because it understood. So, emphatically, does the world.
