Don’t miss Kader Attia’s La Valise oubliée, on view until December 15, 2025, at the 36th São Paulo Biennial.

French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b1970 in Dugny, France) has long been recognized for a multidisciplinary practice rooted in decolonial thought. His research-based approach confronts the legacies of colonialism and develops the notion of “repair” as a way to heal objects, bodies, memories, and representations, resisting erasure while imagining new forms of care.

At this edition of the Biennial, Attia presents La Valise oubliée,(The Forgotten Suitcase, 2024), a video installation that interweaves individual and collective histories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). Taking the suitcase as a potent metaphor of both the past unveiled and the future yet to be written, the work unfolds through different suitcases connected to French artist and Algerian sympathizer Jean-Jacques Lebel, feminist decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès, and the artist’s mother.

From a secret letter entrusted to Lebel by the Algerian National Liberation Front, to a photo album belonging to Jacques Vergès (Françoise Vergès’s uncle, who defended Algerian militants), to intimate photographs of Attia’s mother, these objects evoke memories that are both deeply personal and historically charged. Together, they call forth the countless unnamed men and women who resisted colonial oppression, weaving stories of family, resistance, and collective remembrance.

As in much of Attia’s practice, La Valise oubliée enacts a ghostly remembrance of colonial violence while suggesting repair through acts of memory. It is both a meditation on loss and resilience, and an invitation to re-member what has been dis-membered.

Photo credits : © Natt Fejfar / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo