Oil and Sugar 2

Oil and Sugar #2 is a work of art created by Algerian-French artist Kader Attia.[1] It is a film of small, rectangular blocks of white sugar stacked in the shape of a cube on a decoratively rimmed silver plate. Petroleum oil is poured from a vessel and splashed onto the cube nonuniformly. The oil stains the white sugar cubes in streaks of black as it penetrates the porous sugar blocks and pools on the plate. Eventually, the stacks of sugar begin to collapse from saturation, with the entire cube folding in on itself. The end result is a dissolving, distorted black mass of sugar cubes soaked in oil.

The uniform sugar cube covered in black evokes imagery of the Kaaba in Mecca, the site of the Hajj pilgrimage in Islam.[2] Other interpretations of this artwork see Attia as challenging the white cube as the “archetypal form of modernist architecture.”[3] Slowly consuming the white cube, the application of oil has been interpreted as a confrontation of the “ongoing destruction and violence sparked by religious and political difference and competition for fossil fuel resources in the Middle East.”[4] Motivated by the problem of colonization and the “notion of domination between one order of things and another one”,[5] Oil and Sugar #2 plays intentionally with paradoxes— exploring “creation through disintegration, presence through absence, and fullness through emptiness.”[4]

  1. ^ Attia, Kader (2007), Oil and Sugar #2, retrieved 2023-12-08
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lowry-2006a was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Polonsky, Naomi (2019). ""Kader Attia's Work Holds a Mirror to the World's Injustice."". Retrieved 9 December 2023.
  4. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference OIl and Sugar #2, ICA Boston was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ ""Kader Attia: Artist and Activist."". YouTube. Bloomberg Television.