Kader Attia’s current exhibition, “Scarification, Self Skin’s Architecture” at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, is the latest iteration of a project the French-Algerian artist initiated with his installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, presented at Documenta 13 in 2012. That first iteration could perhaps be described as an essay in comparative aesthetics written from the vantage point of the wretched of the West. Juxtaposing the disfigured faces of World War I soldiers against broken fetishes, fractured African masks, or stitched-up pieces of loincloth, the project described a narrative arc from the practical notion of repair—redefined as the practice through which colonized cultures appropriate the symbols of the colonizing powers into their own cultural idioms—to the juridical realm of “reparation,” as in the replenishment of a previously inflicted loss. In “Scarification, Self Skin’s Architecture,” Attia returns to this dialectics of destruction and healing, this time through an inquiry into the at-times-material, at-times-metaphoric meaning of injury. The exhibition is staged upon and around a table, Self Skin’s Architecture (2015), surveyed by a wooden sculpture made by the Mahafaly (an ethnic group from Madagascar), severely scarred by horizontal splits. On the table, several photographs of African women with ritual scarifications on their torsos …