Reason demonstrates that the order of things does not only lean on a system based on comparisons or similarities (Rene Descartes, Les Regulae).Indeed, through inference, we can also assimilate differences between things, as analogies that bind things together.
The void, as loss of ethics and absence of markers, our post utopian world get slowly stuck in, can also be read in its opposite expressions: fullness, saturation, outbidding, excess, pollution, overpopulation, over consumption, overdose…
That is what happens today, from art to war.
Reappropriation of things (from language to thought), an ambivalent step in the changing of a society, is not so far from that void.
Maybe does it even embody a kind of resistance to that void?
In outlying societies, the existence of a possible resistance of the subject against global order has become relative. Indeed, as soon as he is appealed by this order, he becomes dependent on, or even subordinate to it.
This resistance represents either an “emergence”, when the subject of these societies becomes, a posteriori, the object of globality, either a “decline”, when, a priori, he does not fit into globalization’s socio-cultural “funnel”, the large access of which hides a narrow exit.
This exhibition is entitled “Black and White – Signs of times”.
It shows how things of the world, at a precise moment of their history, ours, are reappropriated. These things then reveal a language of the identity of the subject, as a way out from his destiny as an object of global order.
Through this difference, the “subject” and the “object” are bound by an hardly observable but true link.
This space, which separates them as much as it links them, like a “way of the middle” that our time does not take – maybe because of prosaicness or fear of truth – is the huge territory of otherness.
This distance that separates “the object” from “the subject”, where the individual is not individualistic yet, where identity is not standardized yet, is beyond our globalized vision of things.
A vision, in which global representation of the world and consumerist individualisms, nationalisms and other fanaticisms meet, and harmoniously ruled by “the democratic morality”.
This space in between, which I here describe in its contemporaneousness, it is the experience of what may be perceptible tomorrow, when it will become an empiricism, and when the world will have change its balance or maybe its thought.
Then, maybe, a thing and its contrary will not be as important as what binds them.
Kader Attia
