Kader Attia (Dugny, France, 1970) combines erudition and critique as he addresses the complexities of postcolonial experience and reveals a connection between trauma and aesthetics in modern history. The artist proposes a radical turn in our approach to cultures, traditions, and objects by calling attention to repair as a key social and aesthetic operator in global experience.

This concept interests him for its multiplicity of meanings, ranging from the material restoration of objects to the bodily scars, mutilations, and wounds caused by political and cultural agents, compounding or denying social trauma.

The exhibition A descent into Paradise offers a narrative approach to his recent work, characterized by a theological and political interpretation of the idea of modernization. It outlines stories about disparate issues such as animism and the adventure that creativity has required in the different territories that have been overtaken by colonization. Attia alludes at once to images of redemption from a variety of spiritual complexes, and to the myths of modernity. His art expresses the rare possibility of a joyous critique, devoid of illusions, but also of catastrophizing; it is an aspiration to document and manufacture profane enlightenments.