The booming newspaper industry of the 19th century provided the platform for an intense questioning of the relationship between the West and non-Western cultures. Visual representations were dominated by a depiction of the ‘wild man,’ a dark and brutal alter ego of the modern Western male. This visual propaganda, distributed throughout and by the Western press, served to shape nationalist and Eurocentric worldviews still perpetuated today.
Kader Attia’s installation here consists of a sequence of shelves filled with newspapers and books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as from today. They depict scenes from colonial history: non-white men (Africans, Arabs, Berbers or Native Americans) committing despicable crimes or acts of violence. Their victims are exclusively white, and foremost women.
Attia explains: ‘Political powers and today’s media revive a secular fear that was born during the crusades, and it is exactly this hegemonic Western iconography that has infused peoples’ psyche for centuries. What media and political powers tirelessly represent as new violence is actually the continuity of a centuries-long conceptual construction of harmful Otherness: the invention of evil, the decisive element of the policy of fear.’
