The follow of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has lengthy centered on the notion of restore as understood each psychologically and politically, bridging the person and the collective, private reminiscence and historic trauma. Initially formed by the injuries of the Algerian Struggle and its lasting imprint on each neighborhood and panorama, Attia’s analysis has since expanded to discover the continuing results of colonialism, migration and cultural hybridity between Europe and the International South. His work persistently intertwines rigorous conceptual inquiry with a deeply materials follow, the place principle and kind are inseparable.
Raised between Bab el Oued in Algeria and the suburbs of Paris, Attia brings a uniquely multicultural lens to his investigation of social, historic and cultural entanglements: how identities collide, overlap and depart seen and invisible scars. On a regular basis objects, artifacts and wartime remnants change into poetic constructing blocks in his installations; supplies function vessels of reminiscence, devices of study and instruments for restore. Via them, Attia restores that means not by erasing harm however by exposing and dignifying it.
In his newest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York, on view via December 13, Attia reaches a brand new degree of poetic universality. His evocative works handle the recurring patterns of the human psyche, modern social behaviors and parts of a shared unconscious that transcend geography and time. Via the symbolic language of artwork, he transforms objects into indicators that illuminate what lies beneath collective expertise.
“There’s at all times been poetry in my work, a approach of lifting the narrative towards one thing extra hopeful, extra human,” Attia explains once we spoke after the present’s opening. For him, poetry is crucial when discussing politics, because it permits one to achieve a wider vary of individuals past the boundaries of ideology or specificity. “If you’re too politically exact, you danger shedding that broader connection. Poetry, as an alternative, can carry emotion and that means to locations that info alone can’t attain.”
On this sense, his mythopoetic follow strikes via objects that enact a type of communal restore, reweaving what has been torn and mending the connection between the seen and the invisible, between the person and the collective, whereas reminding us that therapeutic and restore, whether or not private or cultural, start by acknowledging the fracture and reconciling with it.
Wounds, for him, have at all times been central to his follow, notably when approached in Lacanian phrases: one thing not merely bodily or psychological however structural, arising from the elemental lack (manque) that defines the human topic, created in the intervening time of entry into the symbolic order of language, legislation and tradition. That second marks a cut up from the actual, from immediacy, from the wholeness of the pre-linguistic state of being. Nonetheless, for Lacan, as for Attia, it’s within the realm of the symbolic that the wound may be changed into a scar, and it’s right here that artwork originates—as a software for restore that doesn’t erase the wound however permits it to be symbolized, given a spot in language, picture or kind, so it may be lived with. “The relation between the wound and restore is central to my work,” Attia says. “I feel language, for me, is what truly binds the psyche of the person topic to the collective.”
From this philosophical base, we are able to perceive how plastic luggage made from glass change into a metaphor for the modern human situation. Attia conceived the work 17 years in the past, taking odd plastic luggage, emptying them and shaping them into sculptural varieties. “It was unimaginable to protect the work. Inside two days, they’d collapse,” he remembers. “It was very a lot in regards to the poetry of paradox—between fullness and vacancy, fragility and permanence.” That transience, that ephemerality, was a robust symbolic metaphor that stood for your entire time-bound human existential expertise.
As Attia remembers, the thought originated from a childhood reminiscence of his mom unpacking groceries, when the sunshine briefly reworked an empty plastic bag into an ephemeral sculpture. Years later, whereas working with refugees on the outskirts of Paris, he noticed related luggage left behind on benches and streets, fragile traces of use and survival that exposed the quiet poetry and politics of transience. For him, the plastic bag turned a particularly political object that embodied your entire cycle of manufacturing and waste, the inequalities of distribution, the contradictions of capitalism—all contained in a fleeting, weightless kind. The brand new model within the present, made from glass, creates an much more highly effective metaphor for the fragility of human creation and intervention.
Right here, we are able to already see how Attia’s “poetics of fragments” isn’t merely an aesthetic follow—it’s an epistemological and ontological train that strikes via materials presences accompanying the truth of earthly expertise, sharing its temporal nature.
The title “Shattering and Gathering our Traces” completely describes what Attia does within the present and all through his follow: exposing the fragility of reminiscence, historical past and human existence itself throughout the inescapability of its ephemeral and transitory nature. “The thought is that traces aren’t essentially already damaged, however by their very fragility—just like the glass bag—they at all times carry the potential to be shattered at any time,” he displays. “This rigidity between breaking and mending runs via all the things I do,” he notes, explaining how this continues his lengthy reflection on restore since documenta 12. “Restore and shattering are inseparable. Each act of restore begins with an damage. You see it in all places—within the universe itself, the place the Large Bang was a large shattering that later stabilized via gravity. Even in cooking, you spend your time slicing, mixing and assembling. It’s all shattering and gathering—entropy and renewal, creation via fragmentation.”
Ultimately, his repaired objects and fractured installations embody the human situation: to stay in items, to seek for coherence, understanding this quest won’t ever be totally full. Nonetheless, slightly than falling right into a nihilistic view, embracing the need of entropy because the driving power behind all cycles of delivery and renewal, Attia is within the tales and voices that these traces assist us hold alive. They’re items of a puzzle that enable us to approximate that sense of wholeness, that cosmic order and that means that transcend the drama of particular person or societal destiny.
That is what Attia poetically evokes with the classic suitcases scattered all through the exhibition, every crammed with shards of mirrors. These fractured surfaces remodel the area right into a dwelling metaphor for the human situation—our reminiscences, our psychic and social buildings, each particular person and collective, mirrored as fleeting fragments on the wall like spectral presences, illusions of a “secure” self already dispersed throughout time and expertise. On this sense, Attia’s set up additionally remembers the shadows of Plato’s cave—illusions that each conceal and reveal fact—inviting viewers to confront the fragility of what we take as actuality and acknowledge the ghostly nature of all that defines us.
The symbolic picture of the suitcase finds its climax in Attia’s new video work La Valise oubliée (The Forgotten Suitcase, 2024), the place it turns into a dynamic metaphor for each previous obscurities and future potentialities, taking part in with the thought of an unfinished narrative or repeating histories. The movie presents thrice and three trajectories that intertwine, with three individuals who every encounter a suitcase—an object that, when opened, reveals small, intimate tales reflecting bigger historic ones. When Attia mentioned this with a good friend, she supplied a Jungian interpretation, noting how the suitcase itself appeared to embody the unconscious—one thing misplaced, buried and destined to return. “The suitcase is the unconscious and historical past, just like the unconscious, at all times comes again,” Attia displays, recalling a quote from thinker Mohamed Amalou: “All of us have a suitcase someplace, ready for us.” In his fingers, the suitcase turns into each a logo and a container of reminiscences, ghosts and collective souvenirs, the hidden baggage of shared historical past.
Attia remembers how a dialog along with his mom, who, like Derrida, was born in El Biar close to Algiers, led him to mirror on the thought of ghosts. When he instructed her he was finding out traces, she replied that he was engaged on ghosts. Later, he discovered himself studying Derrida’s writing on hauntology, which defines ghosts not as supernatural figures however because the hint of one thing or somebody that’s now not totally current, but not solely gone. It’s what lingers between life and loss of life, between presence and absence. For Derrida, the ghost “is neither dwelling nor lifeless, neither current nor absent,” however one thing that haunts our actuality—an echo of what as soon as was or what may but be.
Attia’s installations work equally as each relics and remainders, remnants and types of return, every awaiting acknowledgment. “Ghosts exist not because the figures of Hollywood creativeness, however because the very construction of our being,” he explains. “We’re ghosts once we communicate. We’re made from the accrued knowledge, phrases and reminiscences of millennia. Even now, as I’m chatting with you, I’m haunted by all those that got here earlier than.”
The query of how cultures mend their wounds—how they recollect traces and try to provide them order and coherence—and, extra importantly, who controls this gesture, who will get to outline the sense of historical past, has at all times been a key theme in Attia’s follow. It additionally emerges within the present with a sequence of collages within the first room, forming an encyclopedic lexicon of artifacts consultant of various cultures. They act as an entry level, Attia explains, tracing the family tree of latest artwork. “Up to date artwork didn’t fall from the sky. It has a family tree and that family tree is trendy artwork. I needed to discover its origins—its dialogue with pre-modern, non-Western artwork, particularly African traditions that influenced the avant-garde.”
The collages embody this lineage, however as Attia clarifies, his intention was to not interact in a dialog about cultural appropriation and restitution (which he explored in different works and lectures) however slightly to create a porous, overlapping area the place artwork historical past’s hierarchies start to dissolve. “They spotlight the ambivalence on this trade—how trendy artists drew from African artwork whereas standing within the privileged place of the colonizer. I didn’t need to accuse, however to acknowledge that artwork historical past is constructed on each affect and inequality.”
At its core, his follow is research-driven, transferring fluidly between principle and making. “My follow is analysis above all. Concept is vital, however it has limits. The place principle stops, follow begins and vice versa,” he says. “Once I search for inspiration, I learn philosophy. Once I really feel indifferent from actuality, I am going again to creating.” He started amassing objects and dealing with supplies on the age of 11, studying that the fabric world might typically reveal what discourse alone can’t. Working later in a marketplace for a number of years additional refined his sensitivity to things, to materials traces and to the ghosts and tales they carry inside.
“It’s not easy instinct that drives me,” Attia solutions when requested about his course of. “It’s one thing else, one thing that haunts me.” He remembers spending weeks sculpting picket portraits of injured troopers. “Sculpting wooden is completely different from clay. If you carve, you take away materials—you injure it. You may’t repair errors.” He remembers the frustration of spending weeks perfecting a face solely to destroy it with one incorrect gesture—and the surprising revelation that generally these ‘errors’ held extra fact than perfection ever might. “That’s after I began to grasp that an paintings resists being born—it pushes again. There’s ache in creation and in that wrestle, you notice you’re not alone,” he displays. “The fabric is alive; it carries traces, ghosts, reminiscences. After we create, we’re not simply making one thing new—we’re getting into into dialogue with these invisible presences which have at all times been there.” For Attia, this invisible presence—the hint, the mnemonic echo—accompanies each act of creating.
That is additionally why, for Attia, artwork should stay tangible—one thing that may be skilled via the senses in its bodily presence, able to awakening real emotional and psychological responses. Working with matter—wooden, ceramic, glass—requires bodily engagement and an acceptance of unpredictability: one can’t management the end result; the fabric resists whole mastery.
That unpredictability, he displays, is what has at all times allowed people to evolve as inventive, sentient beings. “A.I., alternatively, makes us passive. It dulls our curiosity. The thoughts thrives on problem and when all the things turns into predictable, we are likely to lose focus. We get bored.”
Within the exhibition, Attia additionally confronts the illusory nature of expertise mediated by know-how and social media, which inundate us with tales but depart us disconnected, stuffed with pictures however devoid of true connection.
Anchoring the exhibition is Resonance (2025), an interactive, site-specific set up that explores the strain between connection and isolation in our hyper-communicative age. Filling the primary gallery, dozens of birdcages grasp from the ceiling on slender ropes, every holding a small bell. From the underside of every cage, a thicker rope extends to the ground. As guests transfer via the area, brushing or pulling on the ropes, the bells chime softly, filling the room with layered, irregular sounds.
“For a very long time, I used to be very centered on the political critique of what we name the ‘info society,’” Attia explains. “We stay in a time the place everybody speaks continuously—posting, commenting, sharing—however only a few individuals truly hear. On social media, we consider we’re addressing the world, but we’re actually speaking to a handful of individuals. It’s a society of limitless communication that finally ends up as miscommunication.”
Initially titled Social Media, Attia later renamed the work Resonance to open it to broader interpretation. “I’m not in opposition to know-how,” he provides. “I exploit it, however I needed to reply to it with low-tech paintings. To convey again the physicality of expertise, the playfulness that artwork can provide, even when it carries a severe message.”
In Resonance, every birdcage turns into a metaphor for the person voice that’s contained, vibrating, barely audible throughout the collective hum. The overlapping sounds kind a refrain of fragile coexistence, evoking the phantasm of freedom inside a networked society. As Attia notes, “The bells contained in the cages are metaphors for humanity, every one an indication, a sign, attempting to be heard.”
On this approach, Attia’s set up creates a poetic area of gathering that each resists and displays the alienating grip of algorithmic life. Turning matter into that means, the artist invitations guests to have interaction their senses with the objects as they awaken mnemonic, emotional and symbolic associations. As soon as once more, his artwork transforms seemingly inert or odd objects into vessels of a phenomenology of being that’s without delay earthly and profoundly human, however via the imaginative, symbolic energy of artwork, can restore a way of wholeness, reconnecting us with timeless truths of a shared, ongoing journey of human and artistic existence on this planet.
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