Kader Attia Commits to Repair Without Erasure

‘Urgency of Existence’, Kader Attia’s first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, showcases a selection of the French-Algerian artist’s immersive installations as well as recent video and textile works. As the show’s title suggests, Attia’s oeuvre prompts existential questions. Rooted in the artist’s commitment to repair without erasure, his work is concerned with the personal and collective traumas that our bodies carry, the effort to heal from (or learn to live with) past afflictions and the storytelling power of mundane objects.

With its visceral, confrontational tone, On Silence (2021/24) elicits a sense of unease. Suspended from the ceiling by wires, a tangled constellation of used prosthetic limbs forms a strange labyrinth. While there is no clear indication of these found objects’ individual provenance, Attia has suggested that they belonged to survivors of warfare and territorial disputes, some of them refugees. As I carefully navigate this corporeal hanging garden, my thoughts drift to the whereabouts of the prosthetics’ owners: What catastrophes have they suffered? How did they cope? Casting their shadows on the walls, the limbs – intended to restore balance and mobility to an injured body – instead provoke psychological turmoil. Perched between healing and breaking, unity and fragmentation, these artificial body parts invite us to encounter and acknowledge the scars of imperial and colonial violence, including programmatic efforts to debilitate populations.

From this prosthetic array, I venture toward Ghost (2007/24), a large-scale installation that conjures the ambience of a prayer hall, but with eerie undertones. Save for a narrow, linear path along which viewers can walk, the floor is occupied by waves of enigmatic hooded figures, all sculpted from aluminium foil and crouched as if in deep meditation, emulating bodies of women in prayer. As I stoop to their level, I realize that they are entirely hollow: where their faces should be, gaping darkness stares back at me. What are they seeking? Faith-based belonging? Submersion into collective amnesia? Their soundlessness offers neither testimony nor revelation.

Throughout the exhibition, Attia explores the emotive power of ordinary materials and everyday objects, which store and reveal memories like the body that keeps the score. Hinging on an inconspicuous piece of luggage, La Valise Oubliée (The Forgotten Suitcase, 2024) interweaves individual and collective histories that pertain to the Algerian War (1954–62), a decolonial struggle during which hundreds of thousands of people – the vast majority of them Algerians – were killed. This new video work sees the artist unpacking three suitcases while conversing with three individuals: French artist and Algerian sympathizer Jean-Jacques Lebel, feminist decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès and Attia’s mother. The paraphernalia removed from the luggage evokes intense, sometimes traumatic memories – from a secret letter penned by an anonymous member of the Algerian National Liberation Front (entrusted to Lebel) to a photo album belonging to the controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès (Françoise Vergès’s uncle), who defended Algerian militants during the war, to photographs of the artist’s family members. When faced with the complicated legacies of those we call kin or comrades, how can we approach those stories as a means by which to mend connections and cultivate hope?

Attia’s wish for collective reparation resonates with particular potency in Untitled (Mirrors) (2024), a triptych of canvases that feature sutured incisions on their textile bodies: visible scars. Instead of trying to render these cuts less noticeable, Attia’s stitchwork is intentionally coarse – an expression of faith in the act of openly embracing our wounds to forge sites of connection and regeneration.

Kader Attia, ‘Urgency of Existence’, is on view at Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok until 16 March

^{Main image: Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007/24, in ‘Urgency of Existence’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Jim Thompson Art Center; photograph: Swita Uancharoenkul}