Lehmann Maupin presents Irreparable Repairs, an exhibition of new work by French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. For more than 20 years Attia’s practice has been rooted in notions of injury and repair through works that span photography, sculpture, installation, and video. His work examines how societies and individuals bear the marks of historical trauma—and how those wounds are "repaired," though never erased. This idea serves as a metaphor for colonial histories, personal trauma, and collective memory throughout Attia’s work. In Irreparable Repairs, Attia’s first solo exhibition in Seoul, the artist expands on this fundamental tenet of his practice to explore his recent interests in ideas of fragmentation and gathering, as well as themes of Shamanism, mysticism, and the effects of mnemonic traces on individual and collective consciousness. Irreparable Repairs opens alongside Attia’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale’s In Minor Keys, MoMA’s Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, the Brooklyn Museum’s Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, and ahead of the artist’s curation of the 2027 Kochi Biennale.
Irreparable Repairs features three canvas works from Attia’s longstanding Mirrors series, one of his most recognizable bodies of work dealing with the theme of repair. For each piece, Attia begins by making a number of incisions into the canvas, creating lacerations in the fabric’s surface which he then sews back together by hand, leaving a “scar” of tight threads where the incisions were made. Although Attia uses a very precise stitching technique, he deliberately privileges the visibility of this repair. Rather than acting as though the damage did not occur, or that it has been negated by the subsequent repair, Attia’s visible suturing illustrates his belief that any repair is inextricably bound up with the wound it seeks to heal. Visible repair, in Attia’s practice, becomes a way of acknowledging loss while recognizing resilience.
Also included in Irreparable Repairs are three new sculptures of plastic carrier bags cast in brightly colored glass. These are part of a series that began in 2025 in which Attia reflects on the “Myths and Poetry of Emptiness”—an important element of his practice for almost two decades—as well as his ongoing work with ephemeral objects. By casting these bags, similar to those often found in grocery stores, pharmacies, or markets, in glass, Attia seeks to freeze or fix a typically transitory object, using a fine art material to elevate the disposable bag to the status of sculpture. Conceptually, the plastic bag is most notably a symbol of our consumer society, an object of overconsumption that we are paradoxically both endlessly using and continually seeking to discard, but these sculptures also function as meditations on emptiness, transience, and the human desire to capture the fleeting.
A number of works involving mirrors, which have been an essential material in Attia’s practice, also intersperse Irreparable Repairs. Three new “wounded” mirrors will debut as part of the presentation, alongside a new mirrored rope sculpture, similar to those included in the artist’s Whispers of Traces currently on view in the Venice Biennale. Attia’s wounded mirror works use convex mirrors (similar to “witch mirrors” featured in 15th century Flemish paintings, which he could study during his residency at Le Louvre this year) which he then cuts into, marring the pristine surface. In the continuity of the function of witch mirrors in Classical Western painting and their role in depicting a distorted view of the world, this new series of sculptures is made of black glass, symbolizing the dystopian world in which the algorithmic governance that now governs our lives imprisons us. The mirror is no longer a silvered surface; it is the reflective quality of black glass that bears the wound it inflicts on our existence.
As viewers approach they witness their reflection distorted by the object’s rounded shape and interrupted by the artificial wounds carved into the mirror. In these works Attia highlights the importance of scars, conscious or unconscious, in the human psyche, positing that they are signifiers and proof of our past experiences. In the works’ mirrored surfaces, we see both ourselves and our world reflected with all its attendant distortion and historical injury, whether visible or invisible.
Mirrors have long functioned as a system of abstraction and fragmentation in Attia’s practice—notably in his Mirrors and Masks series in which viewers’ reflections are fractured as they are reflected across a myriad of mirror shards adhered to replicas of traditional African masks. In these works, the fragmentation of the subject is a primary concern, and Attia argues that human beings are not singular subjects but rather boundless entities, containing many identities and selves at once. In his new mirrored rope works this idea of fragmentation is extended and the pieces reflect the entire surrounding environment, refracting it into a multitude of different views. This technique, while formally entrancing, also challenges our innate conviction in objectivity, suggesting that reality is in fact a composite of various histories, experiences, past events and future outcomes.
By bringing together new work from across his oeuvre, Irreparable Repairs, offers a glimpse into Attia’s practice today, illuminating his various avenues of inquiry, artistic concerns, and recent research—including enduring questions alongside new explorations.