Voids, rifts and straits: Kader Attia's mediterranean histories

This article examines the role of images and symbols in today's Maghrebi-Mediterranean Sea crossings. Franco- Algerian visual artist Kader Attia (b.1970) relies on multiple mediums and overlapping techniques to question the extreme disconnect between viewer and image, and in so doing undertakes a powerful critique of the abstraction of the real that pervades today's representation of emigration. I suggest that his works stutter, shock and interrupt those histories that are regularly represented by internet memes of drowned migrants and Instagram trophies. The viewer, an embodied spectator, is driven to fill in what lies in those empty spaces and gaps which highlight our inability to see and the aporetic nature of representation.