Open your eyes. 2010
Slide projection

In a two-channel slide projection, Attia juxtaposes, among other things, images from the African Museum collection with portraits of veterans wounded in World War I. Both underwent serious reparations: the African objects show provisional repairs made by the indigenous people who hardly cared about aesthetic consistency but all the more about practical functionality. The faces of the soldiers are proof of the then still nascent practice of aesthetic surgery, which was likewise a matter of sheer improvisation based on adding alien material to flesh and bones. Other sets of images show Western restoration practices applied on ethnographic objects by adding alien material – quite differently from the indigenous improvisations – and historic photos of body modifications in certain African traditions, such as extreme stretching of lip and earlobe, as well as skin scarification. It is a work with a keen eye to modernity and its double-faced attitude toward "Africanness".