Kader Attia
Shattering and Gathering our Traces
Lehmann Maupin, New York
October 30 – December 13, 2025
Lehmann Maupin presents Shattering and Gathering our Traces, an exhibition of new work by French-Algerian artist KADER ATTIA, marking his first solo presentation in New York in over five years and the US debut of several new bodies of work. Featuring sculpture, installation, collage, and film, the exhibition bridges Attia’s long-standing engagement with repair, identity, and postcolonial critique with a new body of work centered around shattering and gathering. Across the exhibition, Attia seeks to reconstruct interpersonal connection and understanding by engaging viewers in a collective and poetic space. This exhibition comes on the heels of a string of institutional presentations around the world, including the solo exhibitions A Descent into Paradise, which traveled to MUAC in Mexico City and the Amparo Museum in Puebla, Mexico, and The Lost Paradise at CAAC Sevilla in Spain. Additionally, Kader Attia is currently included in the 36th São Paulo Biennial, entitled Not All Travelers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice, on view through January 11, 2026. He recently served as an artist in residence at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, through the institution’s “Les Hôtes du Louvre” (The Hosts of the Louvre) program, where he maintained an on-site studio.
Kader Attia grew up between Bab el Oued, Algeria and the suburbs of Paris. Drawing from his experience of living within two disparate cultures, he has developed a complex, multi-media practice that examines the intricacies of social, historical, and cultural differences across the globe, demonstrating how individual and cultural identity is constructed within the context of political domination and conflict. Often using artifacts, discarded quotidian objects, and wartime ephemera to create poetic installations, Kader Attia transforms the space of a gallery into one of introspection, allowing the viewer to become aware of the complicated and often inaccurate depiction of our multiple histories.
Shattering and Gathering our Traces draws on Attia’s background in history and politics to speak to the reconstruction of identity within the structures of contemporary society. As with much of his work, Attia introduces sculptural interventions across the exhibition through the use of fragmented mirrors, interactive elements, and familiar objects like suitcases to turn his works into sites of self-reflection by implicating the viewer in their activation. Here, Attia focuses on gathering in response to shattering; specifically, the artist positions gathering as a means of collective identity building by resisting the lure of individualism enabled by an increasingly digital world. In particular, the works in Shattering and Gathering our Traces address our contemporary fixation with technology and social media, which creates digital crowds of countless isolated individuals under the guise of connection.
Resonance /ˈrezənən(t)s/ (noun):Resonance describes the amplified vibration of a system when stimulated at its natural frequency, as well as the quality of a sound that is loud and clear, or a deep connection and shared understanding between people or ideas
Anchoring the exhibition is an interactive site-specific installation entitled Resonance (2025), which seeks to foster gathering as an individuating space of freedom. Filling the main gallery, numerous bird cages hang by slender rope from the ceiling, each at a different height and with a small bell inside. Additional pieces of bulky rope hang from the bottom of each birdcage, extending the installation to the floor. As viewers navigate the gallery and brush against or even pull on the lower ropes, the bells within each cage move and tinkle, filling the space with sound. In this way, Resonance brings viewers into the experience of art as a tangible interaction between their gaze and body and the artwork; they are invited to interact with the installation as subjects, both concretely and metaphorically. Each bird cage could refer to an isolated individual expressing themselves under the guise of freedom, yet barely audible when they all speak at once—a cacophony similar to social media. Indeed, when engaging on various digital platforms, users think they are communicating with the whole world, while in reality they are part of a small echo chamber filled with like-minded individuals, as explained by Cass Sunstein 20 years ago in his book Republic.com 2.0. The artwork Resonance creates a space of gathering that allows both escape from and criticism of the alienating grip of algorithmic governance and the isolation of digital social networks.
Meanwhile, in the film La Valise oubliée [The Forgotten Suitcase] (2024)—which is on view in Not All Travelers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice, the 36th São Paulo Biennial—Kader Attia takes the suitcase as a dynamic metaphor for both past obscurities and future potentialities, playing with the idea of an unfinished narrative. Kader Attia unpacks archival materials (primarily Algerian War [1954-1962] memorabilia like letters, photographs, and journal entries) from three suitcases attributed to three individual stories that interweave threads of our collective history: those of French artist and Algerian sympathizer Jean-Jacques Lebel, feminist decolonial thinker Françoise Vergès, and Attia’s own mother. Through this act of gathering fragments, Kader Attia tells the story both of his family and of the countless, nameless men and women who resisted and organized in the shadows against colonialism.
Kader Attia transformed three similar suitcases into sculptural installation works, which provide a tangible experience of the powerful symbolic abstraction that these items have on our psyche. Each suitcase lays open and is filled with shards of broken glass, brightly illuminated in a manner that casts sparkling reflections onto the walls. In these sculptures, Attia invites viewers to gather around that which has been shattered—and that which reflects. The shattered mirrors and their reflections materialize the traces that the suitcases carry as memories. These mnemonic traces are at once abstract, diverse, and unpredictable—they are the ghosts that make us what we are, individually and collectively.
LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK
501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
