Kader Attia: RepaiR is both an artist’s book and a reference monograph on one of the central concepts in Kader Attia’s work: repair.

The extensive publication brings together interviews, essays, archival texts, and visual material, showing how Attia understands repair not as the restoration of an original state, but as an aesthetic, political, and cultural principle. In his work, repair appears as a visible trace of injury, history, and difference.

The volume documents Attia’s artistic research through around 1,000 black-and-white images and contributions by writers and theorists from various fields. Contributors include Kobena Mercer, Françoise Vergès, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Jacinto Lageira, Serge Gruzinski, and Marion von Osten. The publication is further complemented by archival texts by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Edward W. Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Paul Virilio.

In terms of content, RepaiR stands at the centre of Attia’s engagement with colonial wounds, cultural appropriation, memory, modernity, and postcolonial theory. The concept of repair connects material forms with political and psychological dimensions: scars, breaks, and visible traces are not erased, but made legible as part of history. The publication presents Attia’s practice as a combination of artistic work, research, archive, and critical theory.