MATRIX artist Kader Attia is joined in conversation by Stefania Pandolfo, professor of anthropology and member of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. They will discuss Attia’s approach to the concept of repair and the irreparable, after physical and psychological injury, particularly in a postcolonial context, and will reflect on Attia’s artistic process, the relationship of art and war, and the cathartic possibility of an “aesthetic of chaos.”

Pandolfo’s research centers on subjectivity, imagination, memory, and the experience of madness, in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, in conversation with psychoanalysis, anthropology, and Islamic thought. Her books include Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychiatry, Islam (2018), Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (1997), and she is co-author of the volume Face aux désastres. Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (2013).