Atef Berredjem was born in 1982 and lives and works in Annaba, Algeria. He graduated from the Algiers Fine Arts Academy in 2007. His artistic practice spans painting, assemblage, sculpture, installation and performance. In recent years, his works have focused on immigration and colonization, combining images, objects (ready-mades), words or sentences with materials and scenography.

 

Strangers on a Train

Visual essay by Atef Berredjem & Nora Razian
Published in: Pas de Deux: 5 x 2 x 2, Mediterranean dialogues, argobooks, 2014

2013

What do revolution, rebellion, and war look like in relation to our relative motion? How fast do we need to be moving to create a simultaneous understanding of ideologies such as democracy, capitalism, and socialism? While being propelled through space and time, what language can we use to articulate this simultaneous moment?It seems that our current moment is one in which all guiding markers have either been moved or completely erased; there are no fixed goal posts to aim for, no yellow brick road to take us back home. Are we now firmly rooted in a century that has forgotten how to imagine where it wants to go? Or is it that the concurrent pulls of the past and the future have locked us into an inert present? Looking over the wreckage of the ongoing political struggles in North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf, the future appears to have altogether evaporated…