Untitled (Ghardaïa)

For Untitled (Ghardaïa), Kader Attia sculpted a scale model of the Algerian city of the title in couscous, a regional culinary staple. The fragile and ephemeral structure is accompanied by two prints portraying foundational Western modernist architects Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon, and by a copy of a UNESCO certificate that officially designates the city of Ghardaïa a World Heritage Site. Attia’s work calls attention to the fact that both designers borrowed from and reworked the Mozabite architecture native to the city of Ghardaïa, and to the ancient Mzab region, without acknowledging their inspiration, itself derived from France’s nineteenth-century colonization of Algeria and subsequent exploitation of its resources.