Ten to See: New York
By Owen Duffy
Kader Attia
For those of us art workers who might wish to obscure our less-than-glamorous nine-to-fives, Kader Attia’s installation at Lehmann Maupin, Reason’s Oxymorons, creates a familiar dystopia. There’s a sea of cubicles, sure, but this corporate grey environment, with eighteen sets of desks, monitors, office chairs, and headphones cedes to deeper content, especially for those of us who yearn for sophisticated research-based practices. Attia offers us a video library of eighteen interviews conducted with psychiatrists, patients, and philosophers, who together make clear the trauma of colonialism and western hegemony on the personal and cultural psyche, as well as the ongoing path to wellbeing.