● In Mirrors Attia has slashed the canvas and hand stitched it back together again, creating a scar upon an otherwise pristine surface. Attia often highlights his “repair” by making them visible and often the focus and narrative content of his work. In addition to the stitched canvas works and the broken mirror works for which he is known, he has also used melted silver to rejoin broken African sculptures. Attia views these forms of visible repair as a way to expose historical ruptures rather than gloss over or conceal them.
● Mirrors also references the work of Italian modernist painter Lucio Fontana. Kader aims to metaphorically stitch the space that Fontana cut into the canvas in an aesthetically crude way, creating a visible dichotomy between so-called primitive and modern aesthetics.