Kader Attia exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

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"Human beings create things, but emptiness gives them meaning."

This quotation from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzeo is at the core of Kader Attia's new work for 'Momentum 9', the artist's first solo exhibition in the U.S. The French-Algerian artist made waves with his 2005 installation 'Flying Rats', in which children sculpted from birdseed disappeared as they shared a life-sized playground with live pigeons. More recently, his recent series of works titled 'Ghost' depicted women at prayer with vacant, aluminum foil body casts.

His new work also evokes the theme of absence. Attia grew up in a Parisian suburb, the child of Algerian immigrants. His recollections of sleeping five kids to a room, on beds made of wooden boards and pieces of cheap foam, inspire his work for the ICA. A crowded dormitory has been created in the gallery, made with the help of students from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the ICA Teen Arts Council. The students contributed through their labor and also their form, as they traced the outlines of their own bodies lying on the foam, which were then dug out by hand. Melancholic, even macabre, the impressions resonate with the memory of bodies now missing.

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November 16, 2007 -- Kader Attia remembers cramped conditions in the small apartment where he grew up, in an Algerian neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris.

"I slept in a dormitory with my brothers," the artist recalls. "It was five kids in one bedroom."

The boys slumbered on cheap foam mattresses set on low wooden platforms, much like the beds Attia has erected for the installation "Momentum 9: Kader Attia," the latest in the Institute of Contemporary Art's "Momentum" series spotlighting emerging artists. The exhibit opened Wednesday.

There are 24 such beds packed snugly into the gallery, which is dimly lighted by bare bulbs. When you first enter, you might see sleeping figures. Get closer, and you'll see that they're not really there: Their shapes have been gouged out of the white foam.

For Attia, 37, the work is about memory and childhood.

"When adults remember events and traumas regarding childhood, it's almost nostalgia," he says, standing in the hushed light amid the beds. "There's the feeling that we missed something, we lost something. It's the absence more than the presence."

A handsome man with wavy dark hair and a winter scarf looped around his neck, Attia speaks about his work with soulful urgency. "Humans create things, but the emptiness gives them meaning," he says, citing the Taoist philosopher Lao Tse.

Attia strives to embody such opposites in his work. "It's a paradoxical proposition," he points out in his lightly accented English. "The material is soft. What you represent is scary, or sharp. Yet it's like clouds, or smoke. It's subtle, at the same time strong."

His haunting installation requires time and quiet to take in. The three rows of beds make for close quarters. Standing and looking at them is not enough: You have to squeeze your way among them. It feels intimate, even intrusive, as it would if you ventured into a room of sleepers and stood over them. The absence carved into each bed echoes the unconsciousness of sleep, yet the empty forms poignantly suggest a greater, more tangible loss.

"It's important to involve the viewer physically in the space," says Attia. "I care more about the experience than the art itself."

Indeed, experiencing Attia's work can be unsettling. For the artist's breakthrough piece, an installation titled "Flying Rats" at the Lyon Biennial in 2005, he constructed a playground and children largely out of birdseed. Then he set a flock of pigeons loose within the work. Like vultures, they slowly pecked at the children's forms until nothing was left but their clothing.

"It was an extraordinary piece," says ICA chief curator Nicholas Baume, who subsequently invited Attia to mount "Momentum 9," the artist's first solo show in the United States. "When you see an amazing piece by an artist you've never heard of - I was with a group of curators, and we were all talking. Everyone had been impressed with that piece, and no one knew that much about him."

Attia's parents are Algerian, and he grew up in Algeria and Paris. Baume praises the way Attia deals with cross-cultural issues in a poetic way. "A political consciousness filters through in his interest in the human condition, relationships, belonging, being outside," Baume says. "[He addresses] the personal and psychological dimensions of political and social structures."

Sleeping several to a room suggests poverty, but it also conjures up images of MASH units, underfunded hospitals, orphanages, and boot camp. The setup has the whiff of necessity, but it also feels cozily communal. What happens when many people sleep together? "What's the dream life then?" asks Baume.

The artist worked with students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design to build the beds, then invited teenagers from the ICA's Teen Art Council to lie on them and leave their impressions.

Milena Desenne of Arlington and Robin Carter of Roslindale, both 14, helped Attia with the installation.

"We had to lie down in a position that looked like we were sleeping, and he traced us, and then we picked out the foam," says Carter.

"I asked them, 'Lie in your favorite position when you're going to sleep,' " Attia says, wandering among the beds. He points to one near the end of a row, where the head faces in a different direction from the rest. "This one is upside down. Some of the teens told me 'I like to sleep upside down.' My brother loved to sleep upside down."

"It was amazing to get to work with an artist who let us work on the piece and become a part of it," says Desenne, who was surprised by the finished installation.

"I hadn't expected it to be so bare," she says. "It's kind of depressing, but it's really moving."

For Attia, that's the point. "Art is not objective, not only to be watched," he says. "It's to be felt."

At the ICA, empty beds evoke French-Algerian artist's childhood

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Kader Attia - 'Sleeping from memory'

November 14, 2007 - March 2, 2008

Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue,
Boston, MA 02210

Tel: (617) 478-3100