Kader Attia
Art Basel Parcours 2026
Monday–Wednesday, June 15–17, 2026, 10 am–8 pm
Thursday–Sunday, June 18–21, 2026, 10 am–7 pm
UBS Bank
Aeschenvorstadt 1, 4051 Basel
next to Kunstmuseum Basel
Regen Projects and Nagel Draxler are pleased to support the installation of Kader Attia’s Untitled (Rainsticks) (2024) as part of Art Basel Parcours 2026. The large-scale variable sculpture presents a balletic visual choreography of motorized rainsticks that speak simply and deeply to modernity’s promise of dominion over nature, the bifurcation of nature and culture, and the timely question of collectivity’s possibility.
Kader Attia’s practice highlights and challenges the enduring legacies of Western colonialism via a rigorous, research-based process that examines the psychoanalytical and sociological effects of shared histories. Attia often deploys evocative formal, critical, and material strategies to survey themes of colonial ambition in urban and natural environments, historical legacies of trauma and repair, and ongoing attempts to resist mechanisms of power.
Untitled (Rainsticks) visually and aurally speaks to the overlapping themes of Attia’s artistic practice. Activated by rotary motors, the titular percussive instruments are made from natural materials that evoke the sound of rain through poetic, circular movements that advance from a soft trickle to a heavy storm. Moving collectively and individually, the clock-like motion of the rainsticks alludes to the cycles of falling rain and the passing of time.
As Attia has stated of the work and regarding thoughts of rainfall, “while humans continually embrace the certainty of an illusory superiority over Nature that keeps them on the surface of their disappearance and produces unprecedented tragedies, they are the object of an agency that rainfall poetically illustrates. They rise and fall again, tirelessly...”
Untitled (Rainsticks) has been included in institutional exhibitions at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, MUAC Museo Universitaro Arte Contemporaneo, and Museo Amparo.
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Kader Attia (b. 1970, Dugny, France) lives and works in Berlin and Paris.
Solo exhibitions have been presented at Museo Amparo, Puebla (2025); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) (2025); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville (2025); MUAC, Mexico City (2025); Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), Bogota (2024); MO.CO., Montpellier (2024); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2024); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2021); Kunsthaus Zürich (2020); Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2020); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2019); Hayward Gallery, London (2019); The Power Plant, Toronto (2018); Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MACVAL), Vitry-sur-Seine (2018); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2016); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2012); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007).
Recent biennials and group exhibitions include In Minor Keys, 61st Venice Biennale (2026); The World Tree, 24th Paiz Biennial, Guatemala City (2025–2026); Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025–2026); Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago (2024); Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Art Foundation (2023); 12th Shanghai Biennial (2018). In 2022 Attia curated Still Present! the 12th Berlin Biennale, and he will curate the Seventh Kochi-Muziris Biennale, opening in Kochi, India, December 2027.
Attia has received several prestigious awards including the Joan Miró Prize (2017), the Yanghyun Prize (2017), and the Prix Marcel Duchamp (2016). In 2025, he was the resident Hôte du Louvre.
His work is included in numerous public and private collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sharjah Art Foundation; Société Générale, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.