Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1599140" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/KA-LMG-NY-2025-install-29-hr.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="In a dark gallery, a person stands near two open suitcases placed on the floor—one yellow and one orange—each projecting moving light patterns onto the surrounding walls." width="970" height="728" data-caption='“Kader Attia: Shattering and Gathering our Traces” is at Lehman Maupin in New York through December 20, 2025. <span class=”media-credit”>© Kader Attia. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. Photo by Studio Kukla.</span>’>

The practice of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia has long centered on the notion of repair as understood both psychologically and politically, bridging the individual and the collective, personal memory and historical trauma. Initially shaped by the wounds of the Algerian War and its lasting imprint on both community and landscape, Attia’s research has since expanded to explore the ongoing effects of colonialism, migration and cultural hybridity between Europe and the Global South. His work consistently intertwines rigorous conceptual inquiry with a deeply material practice, where theory and form 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, historical and cultural entanglements: how identities collide, overlap and leave visible and invisible scars. Everyday objects, artifacts and wartime remnants become poetic building blocks in his installations; materials serve as vessels of memory, instruments of analysis and tools for repair. Through them, Attia restores meaning not by erasing damage but by exposing and dignifying it.

In his latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York, on view through December 13, Attia reaches a new level of poetic universality. His evocative works address the recurring patterns of the human psyche, contemporary social behaviors and elements of a shared unconscious that transcend geography and time. Through the symbolic language of art, he transforms objects into signs that illuminate what lies beneath collective experience.

“There’s always been poetry in my work, a way of lifting the narrative toward something more hopeful, more human,” Attia explains when we spoke after the show’s opening. For him, poetry is essential when discussing politics, as it allows one to reach a wider range of people beyond the boundaries of ideology or specificity. “When you’re too politically precise, you risk losing that broader connection. Poetry, instead, can carry emotion and meaning to places that facts alone can’t reach.”

In this sense, his mythopoetic practice moves through objects that enact a form of communal repair, reweaving what has been torn and mending the connection between the visible and the invisible, between the individual and the collective, while reminding us that healing and repair, whether personal or cultural, begin by acknowledging the fracture and reconciling with it.

Wounds, for him, have always been central to his practice, particularly when approached in Lacanian terms: something not merely physical or psychological but structural, arising from the fundamental lack (manque) that defines the human subject, created at the moment of entry into the symbolic order of language, law and culture. That moment marks a split from the real, from immediacy, from the wholeness of the pre-linguistic state of being. Still, for Lacan, as for Attia, it is in the realm of the symbolic that the wound can be turned into a scar, and it is here that art originates—as a tool for repair that does not erase the wound but allows it to be symbolized, given a place in language, image or form, so it can be lived with. “The relation between the wound and repair is central to my work,” Attia says. “I think language, for me, is what actually binds the psyche of the individual subject to the collective.”

From this philosophical base, we can understand how plastic bags made of glass become a metaphor for the contemporary human condition. Attia conceived the work 17 years ago, taking ordinary plastic bags, emptying them and shaping them into sculptural forms. “It was impossible to preserve the work. Within two days, they would collapse,” he recalls. “It was very much about the poetry of paradox—between fullness and emptiness, fragility and permanence.” That transience, that ephemerality, was a powerful symbolic metaphor that stood for the entire time-bound human existential experience.

As Attia recalls, the idea originated from a childhood memory of his mother unpacking groceries, when the light briefly transformed an empty plastic bag into an ephemeral sculpture. Years later, while working with refugees on the outskirts of Paris, he saw similar bags left behind on benches and streets, fragile traces of use and survival that revealed the quiet poetry and politics of transience. For him, the plastic bag became an extremely political object that embodied the entire cycle of production and waste, the inequalities of distribution, the contradictions of capitalism—all contained in a fleeting, weightless form. The new version in the show, made of glass, creates an even more powerful metaphor for the fragility of human creation and intervention.

Here, we can already see how Attia’s “poetics of fragments” is not merely an aesthetic practice—it’s an epistemological and ontological exercise that moves through material presences accompanying the reality of earthly experience, sharing its temporal nature.

The title  “Shattering and Gathering our Traces” perfectly describes what Attia does in the show and throughout his practice: exposing the fragility of memory, history and human existence itself within the inescapability of its ephemeral and transitory nature. “The idea is that traces aren’t necessarily already broken, but by their very fragility—like the glass bag—they always carry the potential to be shattered at any time,” he reflects. “This tension between breaking and mending runs through everything I do,” he notes, explaining how this continues his long reflection on repair since documenta 12. “Repair and shattering are inseparable. Every act of repair begins with an injury. You see it everywhere—in the universe itself, where the Big Bang was a massive shattering that later stabilized through gravity. Even in cooking, you spend your time cutting, mixing and assembling. It’s all shattering and gathering—entropy and renewal, creation through fragmentation.”

Eventually, his repaired objects and fractured installations embody the human condition: to live in pieces, to search for coherence, knowing this quest will never be fully complete. Still, rather than falling into a nihilistic view, embracing the necessity of entropy as the driving force behind all cycles of birth and renewal, Attia is interested in the stories and voices that those traces help us keep alive. They are pieces of a puzzle that allow us to approximate that sense of wholeness, that cosmic order and meaning that transcend the drama of individual or societal fate.

This is what Attia poetically evokes with the vintage suitcases scattered throughout the exhibition, each filled with shards of mirrors. These fractured surfaces transform the space into a living metaphor for the human condition—our memories, our psychic and social structures, both individual and collective, reflected as fleeting fragments on the wall like spectral presences, illusions of a “stable” self already dispersed across time and experience. In this sense, Attia’s installation also recalls the shadows of Plato’s cave—illusions that both conceal and reveal truth—inviting viewers to confront the fragility of what we take as reality and acknowledge the ghostly nature of all that defines us.

The symbolic image of the suitcase finds its climax in Attia’s new video work La Valise oubliée (The Forgotten Suitcase, 2024), where it becomes a dynamic metaphor for both past obscurities and future potentialities, playing with the idea of an unfinished narrative or repeating histories. The film presents three times and three trajectories that intertwine, with three people who each encounter a suitcase—an object that, when opened, reveals small, intimate stories reflecting larger historical ones. When Attia discussed this with a friend, she offered a Jungian interpretation, noting how the suitcase itself seemed to embody the unconscious—something lost, buried and destined to return. “The suitcase is the unconscious and history, like the unconscious, always comes back,” Attia reflects, recalling a quote from philosopher Mohamed Amalou: “We all have a suitcase somewhere, waiting for us.” In his hands, the suitcase becomes both a symbol and a container of memories, ghosts and collective souvenirs, the hidden baggage of shared history.

Attia recalls how a conversation with his mother, who, like Derrida, was born in El Biar near Algiers, led him to reflect on the idea of ghosts. When he told her he was studying traces, she replied that he was working on ghosts. Later, he found himself reading Derrida’s writing on hauntology, which defines ghosts not as supernatural figures but as the trace of something or someone that is no longer fully present, yet not entirely gone. It is what lingers between life and death, between presence and absence. For Derrida, the ghost “is neither living nor dead, neither present nor absent,” but something that haunts our reality—an echo of what once was or what might yet be.

Attia’s installations work similarly as both relics and remainders, remnants and forms of return, each awaiting acknowledgment. “Ghosts exist not as the figures of Hollywood imagination, but as the very structure of our being,” he explains. “We are ghosts when we speak. We are made of the accumulated data, words and memories of millennia. Even now, as I’m speaking to you, I’m haunted by all those who came before.”

The question of how cultures mend their wounds—how they recollect traces and attempt to give them order and coherence—and, more importantly, who controls this gesture, who gets to define the sense of history, has always been a key theme in Attia’s practice. It also emerges in the show with a series of collages in the first room, forming an encyclopedic lexicon of artifacts representative of different cultures. They act as an entry point, Attia explains, tracing the genealogy of contemporary art. “Contemporary art didn’t fall from the sky. It has a genealogy and that genealogy is modern art. I wanted to explore its origins—its dialogue with pre-modern, non-Western art, especially African traditions that influenced the avant-garde.”

The collages embody this lineage, but as Attia clarifies, his aim was not to engage in a conversation about cultural appropriation and restitution (which he explored in other works and lectures) but rather to create a porous, overlapping space where art history’s hierarchies begin to dissolve. “They highlight the ambivalence in this exchange—how modern artists drew from African art while standing in the privileged position of the colonizer. I didn’t want to accuse, but to acknowledge that art history is built on both influence and inequality.”

At its core, his practice is research-driven, moving fluidly between theory and making. “My practice is research above all. Theory is important, but it has limits. Where theory stops, practice begins and vice versa,” he says. “When I look for inspiration, I read philosophy. When I feel detached from reality, I go back to making.” He began collecting objects and working with materials at the age of 11, learning that the material world could often reveal what discourse alone cannot. Working later in a market for several years further refined his sensitivity to objects, to material traces and to the ghosts and stories they carry within.

“It’s not simple intuition that drives me,” Attia answers when asked about his process. “It’s something else, something that haunts me.” He recalls spending weeks sculpting wooden portraits of injured soldiers. “Sculpting wood is different from clay. When you carve, you remove material—you injure it. You can’t fix mistakes.” He remembers the frustration of spending weeks perfecting a face only to ruin it with one wrong gesture—and the unexpected revelation that sometimes those ‘mistakes’ held more truth than perfection ever could. “That’s when I started to understand that an artwork resists being born—it pushes back. There’s pain in creation and in that struggle, you realize you’re not alone,” he reflects. “The material is alive; it carries traces, ghosts, memories. When we create, we’re not just making something new—we’re entering into dialogue with those invisible presences that have always been there.” For Attia, this invisible presence—the trace, the mnemonic echo—accompanies every act of making.

This is also why, for Attia, art must remain tangible—something that can be experienced through the senses in its physical presence, capable of awakening genuine emotional and psychological responses. Working with matter—wood, ceramic, glass—requires physical engagement and an acceptance of unpredictability: one cannot control the outcome; the material resists total mastery.

That unpredictability, he reflects, is what has always allowed humans to evolve as creative, sentient beings. “A.I., on the other hand, makes us passive. It dulls our curiosity. The mind thrives on challenge and when everything becomes predictable, we tend to lose focus. We get bored.”

In the exhibition, Attia also confronts the illusory nature of experience mediated by technology and social media, which inundate us with stories yet leave us disconnected, full of images but devoid of true connection.

Anchoring the exhibition is Resonance (2025), an interactive, site-specific installation that explores the tension between connection and isolation in our hyper-communicative age. Filling the main gallery, dozens of birdcages hang from the ceiling on slender ropes, each holding a small bell. From the bottom of each cage, a thicker rope extends to the floor. As visitors move through the space, brushing or pulling on the ropes, the bells chime softly, filling the room with layered, irregular sounds.

“For a long time, I was very focused on the political critique of what we call the ‘information society,’” Attia explains. “We live in a time where everyone speaks constantly—posting, commenting, sharing—but very few people actually listen. On social media, we believe we’re addressing the world, yet we’re really talking to a handful of people. It’s a society of endless communication that ends up as miscommunication.”

Initially titled Social Media, Attia later renamed the work Resonance to open it to broader interpretation. “I’m not against technology,” he adds. “I use it, but I wanted to respond to it with low-tech artwork. To bring back the physicality of experience, the playfulness that art can offer, even when it carries a serious message.”

In Resonance, each birdcage becomes a metaphor for the individual voice that is contained, vibrating, barely audible within the collective hum. The overlapping sounds form a chorus of fragile coexistence, evoking the illusion of freedom within a networked society. As Attia notes, “The bells inside the cages are metaphors for humanity, each one a sign, a signal, trying to be heard.”

In this way, Attia’s installation creates a poetic space of gathering that both resists and reflects the alienating grip of algorithmic life. Turning matter into meaning, the artist invites visitors to engage their senses with the objects as they awaken mnemonic, emotional and symbolic associations. Once again, his art transforms seemingly inert or ordinary objects into vessels of a phenomenology of being that is at once earthly and profoundly human, but through the imaginative, symbolic power of art, can restore a sense of wholeness, reconnecting us with timeless truths of a shared, ongoing journey of human and creative existence on this planet.

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