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.