From 1 to 13 June 2021 the video Oil and Sugar #2 (2007) by Kader Attia is on view in public space, as part of Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia!

The work is screened at Stadhuisbrug 5 (in the window of former Broese book shop, facing Utrecht City Hall), Mondays−Sundays from 08.00–24.00 hrs. With special thanks to Art Utrecht.

Artwork description:
Kader Attia, Oil and Sugar #2, 2007, video, 4:30 min.

In Oil and Sugar #2, a construction made from sugar cubes dissolves as crude oil is poured onto it. It looks like a building imploding in slow motion and then returning from collapse to its initial state, time and again, as the video loops. The work speaks to the place of oil and sugar in the colonial “architecture” of the global world, historically and at present. Recalling at once the plantation and sugar slavery and petroleum and extractive capital’s machinery, the video echoes this world of inequality, injustice, poverty, repression, and exclusion for many; this is what hides behind the facade of perfectly straight lines and the clean aesthetic of western-modern minimalism that the white block alludes to. Although turning dark and melting into chaos in the process, the construction manages to endlessly return unchanged. The seeming impossibility to disrupt this vicious circle of disintegration and continuous reemergence unveils the monstrosity of the challenge ahead for the hard labor of decolonization. Yet in every decline, uncertainty, and catastrophe there is emergence and thus a possibility to reroute the loop into repair, not as a return to what has been but as a gateway between one world and the next.

Audio, for those who scanned the QR code: