Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 50, No. 1, doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqt025
Advance Access Publication 19 June 2013
C U B I S T C O U N T E R P O I N T:
T R A N S N AT I O N A L A E S T H E T I C S
I N V I D E O, S C U L P T U R E A N D
I N S TA L L AT I O N A RT B Y M O U N I R FAT M I
SIOBHÁN SHILTON
ABSTRACT
This article addresses distinctively visual means of presenting ‘Islam’ in ways that
resist singular readings. It focuses primarily on the work of Paris-based artist
Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970 Tangiers, Morocco). Drawing on a combination of visual
studies and postcolonial studies (both Francophone and Anglophone), this article
asks how contemporary artwork draws on features specific to the media of video,
sculpture and installation to produce visual, or multisensorial, ‘creoles’, in parallel to its more commonly studied literary counterparts. It shows how artwork in
such media exceeds postcolonial concepts such as ‘transculturation’ and ‘counterpoint’ in an uneven, globalized frame. It argues that ‘postcolonial’, transnational
art resonates both with postcolonial thought and with enduring artistic preoccupations and practices in its forging of a visual language with which to evoke alterity,
or to ‘represent the unrepresentable’.
Keywords: postcolonial; transnational; visual art; counterpoint; transculturation;
opacité; double critique; Cubism; informe; Fatmi, Mounir
How do you represent the unrepresentable, unrepresentable due to over[-]exposure or lack
of exposure? How do you represent that which has been drained of meaning, misrepresented to the point of over[-]saturation, yet underappreciated and neglected to the point of
absurdity? Is it even futile to attempt such an endeavour? Maybe it is advisable ... perhaps
not.1
THESE QUESTIONS, first posed by the Canada-based artist Jayce Salloum in relation
to art exploring the ‘Arab’ world, were reprised by Zineb Sedira, a London-based
artist born in France, with regard to the particular difficulties involved in representing the hijab. The issue of the ethics of visual representation of ‘Islam’ and/or
Arabo-Islamic cultures has preoccupied artists increasingly since the events of
9/11 and, a decade later, the ‘Arab Spring’. The challenge articulated by Salloum
and Sedira is reminiscent of the preoccupations of feminist theorists such as
Irigaray and, in a postcolonial context, of Spivak’s renowned question: ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ However, the question of how to ‘represent the unrepresentable’ has grown in complexity; contemporary art tends increasingly to engage
# The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.
All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
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transnationally with multiple alternative forms of ‘imperialism’ from both within
and beyond ‘national’ cultures. Moreover, this question poses particular difficulties for visual artists, given that stereotypes are so emphatic and pervasive in their
visual forms.
This article addresses means of resisting singular readings in ‘postcolonial’,
transnational art. Focusing primarily on video, sculpture and installation by
Paris-based artist Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970 Tangiers, Morocco), it is driven by the
following questions: how does artwork exploring cross-cultural encounters draw
on features specific to these media to produce distinctively visual, or multisensorial, ‘creoles’? In what ways does it give rise to particular modes of ‘reading’
transnational visual culture? How does such artwork ‘visualize’ certain postcolonial concepts in an uneven, globalized frame?
Work in visual media can be seen to call for a nuanced understanding of the
terms ‘transculturation’ and ‘counterpoint’ that are frequently cited in postcolonial literary criticism. Such art coalesces, in certain ways, with its literary
counterparts. Reminiscent of Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of ‘transculturation’
(which builds on that of Fernando Ortiz in Cuban Counterpoint), ‘postcolonial art’
emphasizes selection and adaptation in the process of cultural exchange.2 It holds
disparate formal and cultural elements in tension, rather than hybridizing or
fusing them. It illustrates what art critic Jean Fisher (following Marcos Becquer
and José Gatti) has characterized as the ‘syncretic turn’, to distinguish such practices from ‘hybridity’, and the resolution of contradictions that this term
frequently implies.3 Postcolonial art conveys a process of reciprocal, relational,
non-hierarchical exchange between cultures. However, it exceeds the two-way
dynamic described by Pratt, involving a more complex combination of references
to diverse national, regional, local and global cultural spaces. It engages with, and
contests, multiple artistic traditions, often forging transversal, or ‘minor transnational’, connections that circumvent ‘the West’.4 The co-existence, in such art,
of cultural elements indicative of interrelated, yet distinct, histories is equally reminiscent of Edward Said’s notion of ‘counterpoint’ to highlight overlapping
cultures and alternative, yet intertwined, histories of colonialism.5 Said theorizes a
‘contrapuntal’ reading practice whereby the critic interprets a novel with a ‘simultaneous awareness’ of both colonial and counter-colonial themes, thus allowing
an ‘alternate privileging’ and interplay of these themes, in a manner similar
to counterpoint in music. In postcolonial art – as in postcolonial literature –
elements indicative of alternative cultures and histories co-exist explicitly within
the same work, encouraging in the viewer a ‘contrapuntal awareness’. However,
such artwork similarly moves beyond the encounters between former colonizer
and former colonized described by Said. Indeed, critics have exposed the limits of
Saidian counterpoint, demonstrating that it risks presenting discourse as monolithic and obscuring the very voices that a contrapuntal reading aims ostensibly to
recover.6
This artwork demonstrates the ambivalent dynamics of postcolonial contact
zones, allowing contradictory ‘untranslatable’ voices and ‘unrepresentable’ visions
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to emerge. In this way it resonates less with the work of Pratt or Said than with
alternative philosophical explorations – or literary reflections – of cultural diversity and ethics of relationality in the work of French-speaking postcolonial thinkers
and writers such as Abdelkebir Khatibi, Assia Djebar and Edouard Glissant.
The renegotiation, in such artwork, of alternative perceived hegemonies is particularly reminiscent of Khatibi’s double critique of essentialist tendencies in both
Western and Islamic traditions.7 Indeed, Françoise Lionnet has illuminated the
ways in which Khatibi’s double critique exposes the limits of Said’s ‘counterpoint’,
while also highlighting the previously unacknowledged points of convergence
between these concepts.8 In particular, Lionnet demonstrates that whereas the
polyphony described by Said consists of an ‘organized interplay’ that creates
harmony between integral, comparable, translatable elements, Khatibi’s
concept allows for the emergence of ‘untranslated or even untranslatable’
voices.9 These voices exceed the boundaries of the harmonious ‘contrapuntal
ensemble’ conceptualized by Said.10 Khatibi’s double critique involves opposing
totalizing ideologies formulated in either French or Arabic by thinking ‘dans une
pensée autre qui parle en langues, se mettant à l’écoute de toute parole – d’où
qu’elle vienne’.11 Postcolonial artwork resonates with the concepts of both Said
and Khatibi, visualizing a polyphonic interplay, but allowing its internal order to
be perpetually disrupted by dissonance and atonality (to extend Said’s use of
musical metaphors); that is, making way for alternative, exterior voices or visions
indicative of irreducible ‘otherness’, or what Glissant terms opacité.12 However,
contemporary postcolonial works reveal an increasingly complex, multidirectional critique of alternative totalizing ideologies in a shifting and uneven
transnational context.
Indeed, in their communication of the interconnectedness, yet distinctiveness,
of diverse and dynamic cultures, they echo certain more recent theories of globalization. The visualization of multidirectional – including transversal – global
flows is reminiscent of Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo’s conceptualization of a ‘dislocated cultural space’.13 The indication of tensions and ambivalence
between cultures, which highlights the impossibility of absolute cultural homogenization while avoiding the ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm, resonates with Arjun
Appadurai’s emphasis on the inevitability of ‘heterogenization’ in the process of
transnational exchange.14 With regard specifically to the presentation of, or allusion to, ‘Islam’ – as a religious, cultural and/or political category – postcolonial,
transnational works tend increasingly to engage with its varying manifestations in
a globalized – or particular diasporic – frame, or in specific ‘post-Revolutionary’
contexts across the Arab world. Such works can be seen to nuance perceptions
of Islam and globalization, Islam and secularism, or Islam and democracy, as
polar, mutually confrontational opposites, corresponding with certain political
theories.15 Moreover, the movement of such artwork beyond certain postcolonial
concepts results also from their visual or multisensorial specificity. It is, above all,
the capacity inherent in art forms to evoke, through non-narrative means, a plurality of possible discourses – and to involve the viewer in discourse – that calls us
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to look again at the concepts of ‘transculturation’ and ‘counterpoint’. Indeed, in
its tendency to allude ambiguously to diverse spaces, times and perspectives, such
artwork is particularly apt to visualize the ‘untranslatable’. Moreover, as Jean
Fisher asserts,
Visual art remains a materially based process, functioning on the level of affect, not purely
semiotics – i.e., a synaesthetic relation is established between work and viewer, which is
in excess of visuality.16
Postcolonial artwork tends to combine disjunctive signifiers and sensorial elements
to refer to apparently stable visual forms while simultaneously ‘exceeding’ them.
This draws the spectator into a multisensorial, multidimensional experience of
opacité and interaction – or a ‘transcultural encounter’ – which encourages them
not only to think contrapuntally but also to think, or view, otherwise.17
In its ambivalent reworking of visual forms – and its triggering of a multiperspectival (embodied) viewing process – postcolonial art is reminiscent of the
formal experiments of Cubism. Picasso and Braque sought to depict objects literally from a multitude of perspectives. In their paintings and later collages, objects
and the space surrounding them are fragmented and reassembled to produce an
image that ambiguously both alludes to the ‘real’ world and abstracts it. In postcolonial art, multiple perspectives emerge in the spectator’s interaction with the
work; the features of multiplicity, ambiguity and (frequently) simultaneity coalesce
specifically to encourage a renegotiation of what have become overdetermined
signs, thus allowing for the possibility of new, postcolonial ways of seeing. Mounir
Fatmi’s work demonstrates such contrapuntal, yet multiperspectival, aesthetics, or
what might be termed ‘cubist counterpoint’.
Art that responds specifically to essentializing perceptions of Islam and/or
Arabo-Islamic culture has tended frequently to focus on the performing body. An
example can be found in Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s video Dansons (2003), which displays the artist’s midriff as she belly dances to the Marseillaise. This work engages
ambivalently with exoticist images, almost encouraging voyeurism, while it renegotiates notions of both ‘otherness’ and ‘Frenchness’. Dansons circumvents the
enduring manoeuvre of re-appropriating Delacroix’s Orientalist Femmes d’Alger
dans leur appartement (1834) (as in art by Houria Niati or literature by Assia Djebar).
Instead, Bouabdellah reworks Delacroix’s revolutionary painting La Liberté guidant
le peuple (1830) by placing herself in the position of the French national symbol,
Marianne. Such ambivalent performances of a transcultural body are particularly
recurrent in art exploring veiling. Yohan Leforestier wore a ‘tricolour burqa’ in a
street performance of his fictional French transsexual Muslim character, Nadine
Amouk (2011). Majida Khattari’s défilés-performances (1996– present), by contrast,
are usually staged as fashion catwalks in art venues in which both women and
men parade in transcultural ‘veils’. In Khattari’s performances, references to
local, national, regional and global cultural spaces are combined through discrepant forms, materials, art practices and music. Ambivalent crossings of the
boundaries dividing cultures, genders and sexualities can similarly be discerned in
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Alain Bizos’s series of photographs entitled Liberté, égalité, fraternité (2005), portraying men of diverse ethnicities posing in veils.
Fatmi’s work converges with this corpus in its production of an ambivalent,
multidirectional critique of alternative extremisms and new ‘imperialisms’.
However, it shifts away from the recurrent focus on corporeality and gender and,
moreover, French Republican discourse. Fatmi’s work tends to contest forms of
globalization and religious dogmatism through the ambivalent re-appropriation
of ready-made objects. Echoing postcolonial visual reworkings of the hijab,
symbols of ‘Islam’ are provocatively desacralized, while they are re-oriented to
question monolithic perceptions of Islam and the tendency to polarize Muslim and
non-Muslim cultures. A striking example can be found in Save Manhattan 01
(2003– 04), one of three installations exploring the events of 9/11.18 In this work,
light is projected onto a table of books so as to cast a haunting shadow of the
pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline. Two volumes of the Koran produce the shape of
the twin towers, former symbols of capitalism, while most of the literature on the
table comprises texts in French or English responding to the events of 9/11.
Fatmi’s work signals an equivalence in alternative religious and secular forms of
‘extremism’, while highlighting the power of language to manipulate opinion.
Fatmi’s critique of capitalism, the power of the media or the frenetic pace of
technological or urban development is frequently compounded, on a formal level,
by an ‘intervisual’ process of ironic engagement with – and contestation of –
works by canonical artists.19 An early example can be found in Arabesque, hommage
à Jackson Pollock (1997, 2’21), a short video displaying the simple gesture of
drawing a circling line with a cursor on a computer screen (viewable, along with a
selection of other works, at: ,http://www.exquise.org/video.php?id=981.).20
This impersonal digital drawing parodies the corporeal gestures and fluid paint
employed by Pollock in the process of creating his ‘drip’ and ‘all over’ paintings
( particularly between 1947 and 1950). It signals ironically the origins of this particular brand of Abstract Expressionism in the Islamic arabesque, while this brief
doodle appears simultaneously to parody the laborious process involved in the
production of sacred Islamic art. Moreover, this video critiques the use of visual
languages for ideological (religious or political) purposes; Abstract Expressionism
was employed as a symbol of American freedom – of thought and of economic
markets – in the context of the Cold War.
While Arabesque depends on the work’s title for its full effect, Fatmi’s more recent
work has tended to visualize a multidirectional critique through the creation of
‘transcultural’ objects. White bas-reliefs of Arabic calligraphy sculpted with
antenna cables allude at once to ancient Islamic art, the contemporary global
media and Kasimir Malevich’s painting White on White (1918): a tilted square
within a square in different tones of white. (Produced one year after the Russian
Revolution, Malevich’s geometric, Suprematist painting sought a language that
would distance art from the visible world – and from service to the state or
religion – in accordance with the artist’s anti-materialist, anti-utilitarian philosophy.) Fatmi uses a material object ironically to refer to this non-objective work,
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while employing the cables transnationally and transhistorically to sculpt proverbs
or, in other works, religious or media icons from the Pietà to the captured, dishevelled Saddam Hussein to the Al-Jazeera logo (his works counter the idea that
globalization is synonymous with ‘Westernization’). Alternatively, circular forms
refer to Islamic hadiths (sayings ascribed to the Prophet Mohammed), machine
cogs and Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs of the 1930s. In other pieces, the artist reworks
the Rubik’s Cube to symbolize Western logic and capitalism, the Kaaba (the
central and most sacred point of Mecca) and the cube of 1960s Minimalist sculpture. Fatmi’s re-appropriation and creolization of dominant visual languages in
ways that emphasize their materiality over their referential function is reminiscent
of the decolonizing ( post-structuralist) literary practices of writers such as Khatibi,
Boudjedra, Djebar and Ben Jelloun.
In Fatmi’s video works incorporating transcultural objects, visual discrepancies
are compounded due to the possibilities inherent in this medium for both the manipulation of ‘real time’ and the disjunctive use of image and sound. This is
exemplified by the single-channel video Mixologie (2010), while exhibitions of Les
Temps modernes, une histoire de la machine (2009 – 10) demonstrate how a multisensorial
experience of ‘cubist counterpoint’ can be generated in alternative ways through
the combination of videos, sound and sculpture in an installation space.
Manipulations (2004), a further single-channel video, reveals an alternative use of
time, in combination with objects, to communicate ambivalent transcultural dynamics. In postcolonial explorations of ‘Islam’, video art has frequently been
employed to depict a performance. Both Mixologie and Manipulations incorporate a
performative element: in both cases, hands can be seen manipulating the objects;
however, the focus is displaced from the body’s identity to the effects of the action
being performed. Moreover, Manipulations reveals particular ways of evoking alterity, or ‘invisibility’, through alternative sculptural means, signalling new directions
in transnational aesthetics.
Visualizing diversity: space, time and medium
Mixologie demonstrates Fatmi’s ambivalent treatment of the circular form. In this
video (11’4), two black spinning discs painted with white Islamic calligraphic
hadiths appear as records on a DJ’s mixing table. The video displays a complex
montage of shots depicting the male DJ’s hands scratching or spinning the pair of
black and white records and adjusting the controls. The visuals are accompanied
by an equally complex mixture of distorted, often piercing, electronic sounds and
excerpts of classical music over the persistent, unsettling noise produced by the
record-player needle as it scrapes away at the paint (viewable at: ,http://www.
exquise.org/video.php?id=8560.).21
The two spinning hadiths combine incongruous visual references to the discrepant practices of quiet, religious contemplation and the secular, sensuous pleasure of
listening or dancing to music. Further ambiguities emerge in the crossing of the
ancient, sacred art of calligraphy with contemporary electronic technology. These
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references may, from one perspective, be associated with ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’,
while the piece questions the tendency to separate and align these entities respectively with the local and the global. Moreover, the work’s multidirectional
complexity is heightened by references to ‘French’ avant-garde art of the early
twentieth century. Fatmi’s discs allude (intentionally) to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs,
some of the first examples of kinetic art, as well as post-Cubist paintings of discs
by Fernand Léger and Robert and Sonia Delaunay.20 Reminiscent of Arabesque,
Fatmi’s explorations of circular forms question dominant histories of art – in this
case, ‘French’ canons – and the exclusion of non-European art as ‘traditional’,
while they simultaneously de-sacralize Islamic calligraphy. The artist’s disconcerting works re-appropriate the discs that were characteristic of (frequently)
celebratory responses to interwar modernity and re-use them to convey the frightening pace of technological development in the era of global capitalism. This
theme emerges most emphatically in Fatmi’s disturbing video installation Les
Temps modernes, named after Chaplin’s ludic examination of the connection
between industrialization and alienation in Modern Times (1936). Indeed, Fatmi’s
video works resonate even more closely with Léger’s more ambivalent celebration
of technology in his short film Ballet mécanique (1924).21 Moreover, they can be
seen in terms of an extension – and re-orientation – of Cubist and post-Cubist
experiments with simultaneity and formal contrasts to visualize complex global
cultural dynamics.
Fatmi’s amalgamation of contrasting visual languages in his circular forms can
be seen as a visual equivalent of the narrative processes of linguistic ‘grafting’, creolization or relational poetics that are characteristic of postcolonial literature.
However, distinct from narrative processes, these ambivalent objects encourage a
contrapuntal, multiperspectival consciousness through simultaneous means. The
two discs presented in Mixologie are themselves transcultural objects; that is, rather
than merging languages to produce a new hybrid form, they juxtapose incongruous visual elements that are instantly recognizable and identifiable as either
‘Islamic’ or secular, if not ‘Western’. In such works the juxtaposition of ‘familiar’
and ‘unfamiliar’ elements raises the viewer’s awareness of ‘untranslatability’ in
cultural encounters. This disorientating experience is exacerbated by the use of
untranslated written Arabic; for the non-Arabic-speaker the hadiths will remain
resolutely opaque (the use of written Arabic deliberately to alienate the ‘Western’
viewer is a recurrent practice in ‘postcolonial’ art across cultures).22 Moreover, language is reduced to the status of decoration when the discs are set in motion in
Fatmi’s video works. The discs recall those of Duchamp in his film Anémic cinéma
(1925), which displayed nonsensical phrases to highlight the emptiness and
absurdity of language. Fatmi takes this practice further, negating the referential
function and power of language, through the use of Arabic in motion, to visualize
a simultaneous multidirectional critique. However, in video art counterpoint
tends to emerge both simultaneously and in time. Transnational art in time-based
forms calls for a ‘reading’ of relationships between sensorial or medial elements
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along both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ axes, while speed and direction provide
further ‘vocabulary’ for consideration.
The ambivalence produced by the visual juxtaposition of cultural signs is
enhanced, first, by the use of performance; the DJ’s hands manipulate both the
speed and direction of the discs. Secondly, montage is employed to depict this
process from multiple angles and levels of focus, as well as at different speeds: the
video alternates between brief sequences filmed in ‘real time’ and others filmed at
a decelerated pace. These shots fade slowly in and out. Thus, the two discs can
appear to spin both clockwise and anticlockwise at different rates; close-ups focusing on the spinning Islamic calligraphy or the buttons and wires of the control
panel are provisionally superimposed. This ambivalent visual process of layering
is compounded by the superimposition of, and alternation between, discrepant
sounds. The unsettling scraping sound of the record-player needle persists
throughout the duration of the piece, while equally disconcerting, improvised
electronic sounds are alternated, or heard together, with the ready-made excerpts
of classical music. While the ready-made music retains its original pace, the electronic sounds, like the visual shots, shift between real time and a decelerated pace,
producing sinister distortions. Each is ‘alternately privileged’ (to use Said’s terms),
increasing or decreasing in volume, or becoming inaudible. This video work produces an interplay between multiple discrepant – and often dissonant – visual
and sonic elements indicative of alternative spaces and historical moments.
Counterpoint is demonstrated – and triggered in the viewer – through a palimpsestic, spatio-temporal process of audio-visual telescoping.
In video installation the multisensorial, transmedial experience of ‘opacity’ is
heightened by the allusion to discrepant dimensions.23 Indeed, additional factors
for consideration in analyses of this all-encompassing medium include the relationship between three- and fourth-dimensional (that is, time-based or moving)
elements. Les Temps modernes, une histoire de la machine is shown in conjunction
with other videos and sculpture to explore contemporary global forces of domination and alienation in the domains of technology, urban development and
the art world. Moreover, once again, it aligns these forces ambivalently with
Islamic calligraphic scripts (viewable at: ,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
dFrudN3EfF8.).25 At the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (2010–
11), videos are projected onto each of the room’s four walls, while the centre of
the space is dominated by an ensemble of circular steel saws into which hadiths
have been stencil-cut, the saws protruding menacingly from the floor. Les Temps
modernes, a complex panoramic cluster of multiple circular hadith – machine cogs
of different sizes, rotating clockwise or anticlockwise, is projected onto one wall.
The opposite wall displays a projection of the video Speed City, depicting skyscrapers within which ancient Kufik script shifts up and down, alluding to the speed
of urban development in the Middle East. Two further projections display
L’Homme du livre (2010; 15’), which evokes a futuristic, mechanomorphic body via
a diagram of bright red veins against a backdrop of multidirectional flows of calligraphic script, and Technologia (2009 – 10; 5’), which entails a dizzying process of
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layering and mise-en-abyme of rotating hadiths (viewable at: ,http://www.exquise.
org/video.php?id=8559.).
Within this multimedia installation the spectator is assaulted by the loud, aggressive sounds of machinery and the flickering lights of the four video
projections, which heightens their experience of the ‘clashes’ produced by competing references to alternative forces of global domination. The sharp blades of
the sculptural centrepiece contribute a haptic element to this disturbing multisensorial experience. These seductive yet violent objects, combining the graceful
arabesques of divine calligraphy with the sharp edges of steel saws, appear to
allude to extremist uses of religion, while they point more widely to the dangerous
power of ‘machines’ or systems, including that of language (this connection
emerges emphatically in the video projection of Les Temps modernes through the inclusion of a number of Arabic letters with a key, in Latin script, to their
pronunciation). However, at the same time, the ambivalent blades can be seen as
a means of protection against one-way, global processes of assimilation and, moreover, tendencies to essentialize ‘Islam’; these durable, resolutely transcultural
objects inhibit attempts either to domesticate and absorb ‘otherness’ or to define
and locate it ‘outside’.24 (This latter message may emerge more emphatically
when the installation is exhibited in Europe or the United States.)
This site-specific installation re-emerges as part of Fatmi’s exhibition ‘Kissing
Circles’ at the Shoshanna Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica (2012), a response to a
poem inspired by Descartes’s geometric theorem of mutually tangent, or ‘kissing’,
circles: ‘The Kissing Precise’, by Frederick Soddy (1936).25 Here, Fatmi produces
a more complex contrapuntal, transmedial experience. Les Temps modernes,
Technologia and three hadith-blade sculptures appear in conjunction with five stills
of the final kiss from Casablanca (1942), which are overlaid with diagrams of mutually tangent circles.26 Further ‘kissing circles’ appear in three ‘White on White’
bas-reliefs sculpted in coaxial antenna cables, while a further sculptural piece (The
Falls, 2010) consists of multiple fragments of steel calligraphy spilling onto the
floor from a cardboard box. Here, the idea of the seductive yet dangerous power
of language is extended to encompass that of the media – via the use of cables –
as well as film, though the use of the iconic Casablanca, which predominates in
‘Western’ imaginings of Morocco. The juxtaposition of Les Temps modernes and
Casablanca appears to signal Hollywood as a further hegemonic ‘machine’.
However, the antenna cables, re-used as the sculptural material for bas-reliefs, lose
their original, communicative function. Moreover, the emotional power of the
famous film shots is disrupted by the superimposition of Descartes’s geometric
diagrams of ‘kissing’ circles, as well as the disjunctive sounds of machinery.
Conversely, French Cartesian rationalism (embodied by the diagrams) is coupled
ironically with the emotional scene. The circular blades of Arabic calligraphy, two
of which are encased in Plexiglas boxes on pedestals positioned in front of the stills
from Casablanca, might encourage an alternative (contrapuntal) reading of this
1942 film from a North African perspective. (Moreover, the titles of the blades –
Cut 1 and Cut 3 [2012] – seem not only to refer to the physical objects’ potential
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danger but also, through the vocabulary of filmmaking, to demand a reconsideration of Casablanca). Premiered in New York on 26 November 1942, Casablanca,
which glorified the Resistance, was timed to coincide with the Allied invasion of
French North Africa, yet – as Fatmi’s objects might serve to remind us – the
Maghreb would remain under colonial rule until 1956 and (in the case of Algeria)
1962. The order represented by verbal language is subverted ironically by the
random heap of calligraphic signifiers. The title – The Falls/Les Chutes – potentially
encourages associations with the border location of Niagara, the Christian ‘fall’
from grace, or Camus’s existential chute (depending largely on the culture and language in which it is exhibited), while ultimately this formless configuration is
identical only to itself.
In installation art, the space between the screens and objects is reminiscent of
the ‘gutter’ – or space between the frames – in bande dessinée, which encourages
the reader to use their imagination to complete the narrative, though in this nonsequential medium the ‘viewing direction’ is not necessarily pre-determined.27 In
‘postcolonial’ installation works, the three-dimensional gutter can be employed to
signal the ‘gaps’ and ‘untranslatable’ elements between identities or discourses.28
Moreover, the conceptual, contrapuntal negotiations demanded of the spectator
are ‘doubled’ by their physical negotiations of videos and objects in space.
Counterpoint is experienced kinaesthetically. Fatmi’s sculptural centrepieces
(or the succession of spaces in the 2012 exhibition) force the viewer to mimic the
rotational movements conveyed through image and sound, as well as by the
looping videos. Moreover, their circumambulations are intended ironically to
recall those of pilgrims at Mecca. The spectator is engulfed within multiple concentric circles, while their movement is indicative of contingency and the
potential for resistance.
Works such as Mixologie and Les Temps modernes can be seen in terms of transmedial, transdimensional equivalents of a literary pensée autre. Fatmi’s video
Manipulations similarly generates opacity through the communication of a multidirectional, transmedial critique. However, this work signals, in addition, possible
means of visualizing invisibility through alternative sculptural means.
Visualizing invisibility: ‘postcolonial’ uses of materials
Manipulations (6’50) begins by displaying two hands ‘manipulating’ a Rubik’s
Cube. The process is accelerated through the use of montage and is accompanied
by an unsettling electronic ticking sound. Half way through the video, the cube
begins to turn completely black and acquires a white band. There can be no mistaking this as an abstract form of the Kaaba when the process is interrupted by a
brief shot of the real Kaaba surrounded by hoards of circulating pilgrims. The
hands continue to manipulate the black cube as if still attempting to solve the
Rubik’s puzzle. The black object begins to turn to liquid and cover the hands, as
the cube itself morphs into a viscous black substance, which drips and splashes the
screen (viewable at: ,http://www.exquise.org/video.php?id=2444.).
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In this work, the cube – like the circle in Mixologie – is transformed to become
a transcultural object. ‘Contrapuntal awareness’ is triggered through alternative
uses of space and time. The Rubik’s Cube (symbol of ‘Western’ logic) appears to
become the sacred Kaaba. However, the new black and white object combines the
form and function of the Rubik’s Cube with the colour and composition of the
Kaaba, alluding to discrepant cultures simultaneously. The black and white form
refers, in addition, to the cubes of Minimalist sculpture; reminiscent of Arabesque, it
points ironically to the origins of this form, championed by the American avantgarde in the 1960s, in the ancient stone structure at Mecca.
The plural ‘manipulations’ of the title refer, initially, to the physical action of
manipulating the Rubik’s Cube. However, the metamorphosis of this object into a
symbol of the Kaaba (which the hands continue desperately to try to ‘solve’) produces a visual analogy between the desire to solve the Rubik’s puzzle and that to
know – and thereby dominate – Muslim cultures. This action is evocative of colonial dynamics of possession through knowledge, rationalization and classification.
It recalls the colonial perception of ‘Orientals’ as ‘problems to be solved’.29 The
impression of domination and manipulation is magnified by the downward emergence of the hands from the upper edge of the screen. Moreover, the hands’
persistent manipulations of the black cube result in its disintegration, indicating
the violence of this desire to know and to possess. The hands covered in black
liquid evoke the blood shed during colonial conquests and wars of decolonization.
Rubbing together, they recall the action of washing, while they only become blacker
and dirtier, perhaps indicating the irreversibility of colonial violence and the enduring effects of empire. However, perhaps more immediately, the dissolution of the
Kaaba symbol into this thick black substance, which closely resembles oil, appears
to point ironically to the economic motivations behind the history of Western intervention in the Muslim world. Moreover, the concentration, in the final shots, on the
effects of the ‘oil’ – blackening, staining, running, dripping and splashing – recalls
the environmental damage caused recurrently by oil spills as this product is traded
and transported around the world. In its evocation of such damage, Manipulations
can be seen to visualize a ‘postcolonial eco-critique’.30
The critique, in this work, of global forms of ‘imperialism’ is perhaps that
which emerges most strikingly. However, Fatmi’s critique is always ambivalent.
The insertion of the shot of the Kaaba encourages us to view this cube as an
equivalent centralizing source of power and control. This idea emerges more emphatically when the work is considered in the light of Fatmi’s other explorations of
Islamic language and symbolism. His video Commerciale (2004; 6’30), with which
Manipulations has been exhibited, indicates more explicitly the connection between
religion and capitalism through a focus on consumerism. This work similarly
employs a black and white abstraction of the Kaaba, which the artist places in the
centre of the revolving doors of a shopping mall. Thus, shoppers are forced to
mimic the circumambulations of Muslim pilgrims around the sacred cube as they
enter and leave (echoing the movement of the spectator in exhibitions of Les Temps
modernes) (viewable at: ,http://www.exquise.org/video.php?id=1432.).
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Opacity is generated, in Manipulations, through the juxtaposition of contradictory
symbols of ‘Western’ logic and ‘Islamic’ spirituality, while the sense of ungraspable diversity and instability is heightened through the production of sensorial and
transmedial tensions between image and sound, sculptural object and performance,
abstract symbol and documentary image, geometry and corporeality, solid and liquid,
visuality and tactility. In this work, two-, three- and fourth-dimensional elements are
combined, as they are in the space of ‘Kissing Circles’; radical otherness is produced
through the mise-en-abyme of alternative spatio-temporal-medial ‘frames’. Moreover, alterity is evoked through the use of specific materials.
Reviewer Marc Mercier reads the oil-slicked hands of Manipulations as indicative
of an impending monoculture:
Il va nous falloir être astucieux, malins, cohérents, rapides, car si nous n’y prenons garde,
des mains noires, gluantes, couvertes de pétrole, vont bientôt tout uniformiser, créer le
gigantesque empire de l’ennui, de la désolation, du crime écologique et planétaire organisé,
et nous serons tous des oiseaux suffoquant, claudiquant sur des plages pétrolifères, définitivement malades de n’avoir pas su, ou voulu, nous soulever à temps.31
The video does lend itself to such a reading, and certainly invokes such apocalyptic images of oil-ravaged beaches. However, the discourse of uniformization and
impending monoculture – ‘le gigantesque empire de l’ennui’ – co-exists with
a discourse of resistance. For the black cube, which alludes both to ‘Islam’ and
to ‘the West’, does not actually dissolve; rather, it changes form – or becomes
formless – liquefying, before it can be ‘solved’, known and dominated. It resists
the logic of the Rubik’s Cube and escapes the possessive grasp of the manipulating
hands. The elusive, formless black substance can be seen in terms of an alternative
sculptural language that resists the organizing principles of the cubic form, a visual
language associated, through this work, with domination in both Western and Islamic
cultures. The fluid substance in Fatmi’s Manipulations alludes to a location beyond
iconic, translatable, mutually transparent languages. Black, viscous and amorphous, it
can be seen to refer to oil – and, by implication, new imperialisms – while, simultaneously, it is identical only to itself. It can be seen as a visual indication of alterity
and ‘untranslatability’, or ‘invisibility’, in the encounter between ‘the West’ and
the Muslim world or, more widely, between capitalism and religion.
The evocation of alterity through the use of materials that are ambivalently
both invested with and emptied of referential (cultural) signification can be discerned in the recent work of a number of artists practising in alternative media.
A striking, yet perhaps unexpected, parallel can be drawn between Fatmi and the
work of anonymous graffiti artist ‘Princess Hijab’. This elusive artist targets advertisements, primarily for fashion, in the Paris metro, daubing hijabs onto the faces
of women and men with a black marker pen and spray paint. These ‘veils’, which
tend only partially to cover the models’ bodies, are left to drip over them as the
artist flees the scene.32 Princess Hijab’s practice similarly involves a layering and
mise-en-abyme of contrasting visual languages, a practice which seems to indicate an
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equivalence in the investment in fashion and the practice of veiling.33 This artist’s
work can similarly be seen to provide a multidirectional critique of capitalism –
specifically, consumerism – and religious authoritarianism, but also of monolithic
perceptions of the hijab. Moreover, the action of daubing a ‘veil’ in fluid ink that
runs and drips produces a sign that is at once iconic and indexical. The graffitied
hijab is both an icon of a hijab and an indexical trace of the artist’s iconoclastic
interventions within the body of the French capital. It simultaneously alludes to
the persistence of stereotypes – which depend on iconic forms – and functions to
resist them. It is precisely the indexicality of these marks – and, moreover, their
tendency towards the informe – that allows the works to contest the ready-made
images of advertising in an alternative language outside iconic, translatable, mutually transparent signs or forms.34 Resonating with Fatmi’s Manipulations, the
dripping, black haptic ‘veils’, the irregular boundaries of which are determined
partly by chance, can be seen to indicate fluidity, contingency and elements of
‘untranslatability’ in cultural and social encounters.
Further intertexts can be found in Kader Attia’s series of paintings entitled
Black Cube, in which a roughly cuboid form alluding to the Kaaba is painted in
black acrylic on a white canvas. In Black Cube II (2005), splashes of paint accompany the wavering borders of the irregular ‘cube’, while its base disappears into
dripping black lines that run onto the gallery floor.35 Attia’s sculptural works
reveal alternative means of resisting iconic signs in their exploration of the dialectic
between presence and absence. The installation Ghost (2007) consists of a shimmering ensemble of multiple, life-size, veiled figures made of aluminium foil, all facing
in the same direction with their heads bowed as if in prayer (viewable at: ,http://
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/kader_attia_ghosts_3.htm.). Forced to
approach the installation from behind the figures, it is not until we walk around
them that we realize they are empty moulds. (This installation reveals an alternative
‘postcolonial’ use of kinaesthesia and the three-dimensional gutter.) Any preliminary interpretations of the veiled figures as indicative of a collective – even
communitarian or fanatical – religious identity that is growing in strength are displaced by the revelation of these disembodied shells. These fragile shapes are more
suggestive of human vulnerability and a loss of identity. Attia’s work evokes ideas of
social exclusion – particularly of minorities – and the perhaps fruitless search for
an answer in religious devotion. However, his use of a disposable, everyday material
alludes to consumerism as an equivalent form of (empty) refuge.36 His work resonates with that of Fatmi in its ambiguous alignment of the spiritual with the
mercantile and, moreover, with ‘ecological imperialism’ (through the use of a nonbiodegradable material). A further example can be found in Halam Tawaf (another
work reflecting the current fascination with the Hajj in contemporary art), in which
a circle of multiple empty beer cans are bent to resemble a mass of pilgrims moving
around the Kaaba (2008). Attia evokes a multidirectional critique by conjoining a
discrepant form and material. Moreover, he wields this material to connect form
C U B I S T C O U N T E R P O I N T & T R A N S N AT I O N A L A E S T H E T I C S
53
and what we might call the ‘non-form’. In his preoccupation with things and their
opposites, Attia is influenced by both Foucault and Duchamp.37 However, in Ghost,
Attia’s visualization of the invisible resonates as much with Duchamp’s material
explorations of the infra-mince as with Khatibi’s verbal elaborations of a pensée autre.
Conclusion
Reminiscent of the postcolonial literary processes of decolonization and creolization of dominant languages, Fatmi’s artwork re-appropriates and crosses
alternative visual symbols, objects, sounds, materials and art practices indicative
of discrepant cultural spaces and historical moments. It incorporates the embodied spectator in a transmedial, spatio-temporal – frequently transdimensional
– experience of opacity and interaction, giving rise to a contrapuntal, multiperspectival, ‘postcolonial cubist’ viewing process. Fatmi’s work – converging with
other recent postcolonial art – recalls Khatibi’s concept of a double critique and his
call for a pensée autre, while it can be seen to transpose these ideas to contemporary,
global, transnational contexts. His work is indicative of the emerging emphasis, in
transnational art, on new ‘imperialisms’, including capitalism, consumerism and,
more recently, eco/environmental damage. In such art, symbols of globalization
are frequently combined with those of ‘Islam’ in ways that appear to signal an
equivalence between alternative visual ‘dogmas’, while simultaneously questioning the tendency to essentialize ‘Islam’ and, more widely, to marginalize minority
communities. Moreover, such work reveals new directions in transnational aesthetics.
Diverging from work on corporeality, Fatmi’s work encourages a contrapuntal
consciousness through the use of discrepant and ‘dissonant’ sculptural or assisted
ready-made objects. In video art, such ambivalence is heightened through the use
of sound and montage, together with varying speeds and directions. Alternative
spaces of resistance can be indicated through contingent, spontaneous elements:
the use of improvised ‘music’ in Mixologie, the unpredictable movement of the
cross-cultural spectator in exhibitions of Les Temps modernes, the random configuration of steel fragments of calligraphy in The Falls, or the use of a formless
substance in Manipulations. In postcolonial, relational aesthetics, the artist’s
‘control’ over representation is deliberately diminished through the (neo-Dadaist)
use of chance. Manipulations – converging with work by Princess Hijab and Kader
Attia – signals new means of evoking alterity through the exploitation of the inherent properties and capacities of materials (in conjunction with fourth-dimensional
elements). Postcolonial video art, like performance art, has most frequently been
employed in ways that allude to the ‘unrepresentable’ via the inherently unstable
language of the body. Fatmi, by contrast, uses this time-based medium to depict
the metamorphosis of form into a ‘chaotic’ sculptural language of resistance. In the
experience of postcolonial, transnational art, visual references to ‘otherness’ – or to
‘sameness’ – become signifiers of intractable diversity.
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S I O B H Á N S H I LTO N
Department of French
University of Bristol
17– 19 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TE
United Kingdom
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
This research was generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council of Great Britain. I am also very grateful to Mounir Fatmi, Aline Biasutto,
Shoshanna Wayne and Marichris Ty for answering my questions.
NOTES
All websites were last accessed in March 2013.
1
J. Salloum, ‘In/tangible Cartographies: New Arab Video’, in 19 th Worldwide Video Festival: 2001
(Amsterdam: Stichting World Wide Video Centre, 2001), pp. 354– 417 ( p. 358), cited by Z. Sedira,
‘Mapping the Illusive’, in Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art, ed. by D. A. Bailey and
G. Tawadros (London: INIVA, 2003), pp. 56–71 ( p. 58).
2
M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Fernando
Ortiz uses the term ‘transculturation’ to distinguish the immigrant experience from the hierarchical,
‘one-way’ process suggested by ‘acculturation’: F. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint (New York: Knopf, 1947),
pp. x– xi. More recent reinterpretations of transculturation can be found in: S. Spitta, Between Two
Waters: Literary Transculturation in Latin America (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1995);
F. Hernández, M. Millington and I. Borden (eds), Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin
America (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), and A. Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
3
M. Becquer and J. Gatti, ‘Elements of Vogue’, Third Text, 16/17 (1991), 65– 81; J. Fisher, ‘The
Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism’, in Theory in Contemporary Art
since 1985, ed. by Z. Kocur and S. Leung (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 233– 41.
4
See F. Lionnet and S. Shih (eds), Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005).
5
See especially E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) (London: Vintage, 1994).
6
See, for example, C. Forsdick, ‘Edward Said After Theory: The Limits of Counterpoint’, in
Martin McQuillan, G. Macdonald, R. Purves and S. Thomson (eds), Post-Theory: New Directions in
Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 188–99.
7
A. Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983).
8
F. Lionnet, ‘Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi:
A Transcolonial Comparison’, in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. by A. Behdad and D. Thomas
(Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 387 –407.
9
Ibid., p. 404. The expression ‘organized interplay’ was originally used by Said in Culture and
Imperialism ( p. 51).
10
Lionnet, ‘Counterpoint and Double Critique’, p. 404.
11
Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, p. 63; emphasis in original.
E. Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 203– 09. I have made the above
points regarding postcolonial theory and art in S. Shilton, Transcultural Encounters: Gender and Genre in
Franco-Maghrebi Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
12
13
See J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo, ‘Tracking Global Flows’, in The Anthropology of Globalization:
A Reader, ed. by J. X. Inda and R. Rosaldo (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 3 –46.
14
A. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in A. Appadurai,
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
C U B I S T C O U N T E R P O I N T & T R A N S N AT I O N A L A E S T H E T I C S
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pp. 27–47. My use of the expression ‘the clash of civilizations’ refers to Samuel Huntington’s thesis of
a new world order following the Cold War: S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the
World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
15
See in particular the work of Olivier Roy, for example ‘The New Islamists: How the
Most Extreme Adherents of Radical Islam are Getting with the Times’, in Foreign Policy (16 April 2012),
at ,http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/16/the_new_islamists?page=0,2.; Secularism
Confronts Islam (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2007); Globalized Islam: The Search
for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On art exploring ‘unrepresentable’
visions of democracy in a universal, or diversely transnational, sense, in response to the ‘Arab Spring’,
see S. Shilton, ‘Art and the “Arab Spring”: Aesthetics of Revolution in Contemporary Tunisia’, French
Cultural Studies, 24:1 (2013), 129–45.
16
Fisher, ‘The Syncretic Turn’, p. 234; emphasis in original.
17
See Shilton, Transcultural Encounters.
18
Further images of Mounir Fatmi’s work can be found on the artist’s website, ,http://www.
mounirfatmi.com..
19
I borrow the term ‘intervisuality’ from Hafid Gafaı̈ti, who explores this idea in relation to the literature of ‘Franco-Algerian’ writer Rachid Boudjedra. See H. Gafaı̈ti (ed.), Rachid Boudjedra: Une
Poétique de la subversion: I. Autobiographie et Histoire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). Nicholas Mirzoeff also uses
this term in relation to ‘diaspora art’ in African and Jewish contexts; see N. Mirzoeff, Diaspora Visual
Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge, 2000).
20
Examples include Léger’s Les Disques dans la ville (1920), which echoes the pictorial realism of
Cubism while experimenting with formal contrasts to convey the complexity and dynamism of urban
modernity. The Delaunays were the first to introduce colour and light into Cubism’s monochromatic
palette, exploring the sensorial effects of both in their Orphic works; their paintings of discs – such as
Joie de vivre (Robert Delaunay, 1930) and Rythme (Sonia Delaunay, 1938) – similarly communicate a fascination with modernity, while they demonstrate a shift towards pure abstraction.
21
Consisting largely of mechanical objects, from an aeroplane propeller to kitchenware, Léger’s
Ballet mécanique exploited the possibilities of montage and motion to multiply formal contrasts and to
convey the monotony of modern everyday life.
22
This is particularly the case in presentations of the female body. Examples, across media, can be
found in Khattari’s ‘Robe sacrée’ (in her défilé-performance of 1996) and Mona Hatoum’s short film
Measures of Distance (1988). See also the use of Persian in Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of
Allah (1993– 97).
23
My use of the term ‘transmedial’ to describe art that demonstrates transcultural processes on a
formal and sensorial level is distinct from its conventional employment to refer to ‘the appearance of a
certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of media’ (I. Rajewsky, ‘Intermediality,
Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermédialités, 6 [2005],
p. 46).
24
This ambiguous, affective combination of the seductive and the violent in the presentation of
‘Islam’ can be found in other transcultural artwork. See, for example, Khattari’s ‘Tchador moulant’
(1996), a black, figure-hugging chador with triangular spikes emerging from the seams.
25
My analysis of Les Temps modernes depends on my first-hand experience of the installation at the
Shoshanna Wayne Gallery, as well as recordings and photographs of previous versions of the work.
The ephemerality of work in media such as installation – and its evolution in relation to alternative
sites and objects – raises particular concerns regarding the nature of critical discourse and its relationship to its objects of enquiry. For a discussion of these concerns, and possible strategies to adopt in the
analysis of such work, see Shilton, Transcultural Encounters.
26
The three sculptures are entitled: Cut 1 (2012; diameter 75cm), Cut 3 (2012; diameter 60cm) and
Between the Lines (2010; diameter 150cm).
27
On the gutter in the bande dessinée, see S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
28
A contrasting example, demonstrating documentary uses of video, can be found in Zineb
Sedira’s Mother, Father and I (2003), a contrapuntal exploration of gendered and generational histories of
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the Algerian War and immigration to France. Extracts can be viewed at: ,http://www.zinebsedira.
com/video/mother-father-and-i-2003..
29
E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995),
p. 207.
30
On the recent convergence of postcolonial and eco/environmental studies, see G. Huggan and
H. Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010).
31
M. Mercier, ,http://www.mounirfatmi.com. (first published in Bref, 84 [2008], p. 44).
Princess Hijab’s interventions are widely available online. See, for example, A. Chrisafis,
‘Princess Hijab: Underground Resistance’, The Guardian, 11 November 2010, ,http://www.guardian.
co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/nov/10/princess-hijab-graffiti-france-metro..
33
For more on what can be seen as a ‘transcultural feminist’ art practice in the work of Princess
Hijab and others, see Shilton, Transcultural Encounters.
32
34
Ibid.
35
As exhibited at the British Museum (2012). Resistance to the order embodied by the cube can
equally be found in Attia’s video work Oil and Sugar #2 (2007); this work resonates with Manipulations in
its filming of a cube (compiled of sugar cubes) onto which oil has been poured, which collapses into a
formless black substance.
36
This is suggested by the accompanying note provided by the Saatchi Gallery: ,http://www.
saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/kader_attia_ghosts_3.htm..
37
K. Attia, cited in R. Durand, ‘Kader Attia in Conversation with Régis Durand’, NKA Journal of
Contemporary African Art, 26 (2010), 70–79 ( p. 76).