Adel Abdessemed

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Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed (* 1971 in Constantine , Algeria ) is a contemporary French-Algerian artist .

Life

Abdessemed grew up in northern Algeria and first attended an art school in Batna , and then the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Algiers . In 1994 he left Algeria for political reasons and moved to France, where he enrolled at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon . From 1999, Abdessemed lived in Paris and temporarily in Berlin and New York , where he participated in the PS1 scholarship program from 2000–2001 . Since 2004 he has been living in Paris again.

In addition to solo exhibitions in France, Abdessemed exhibited in 2008 in the Christine König Gallery in Vienna, in 2006 in the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv and in 2007 in P, p. 1; his work has also been shown at several major exhibitions, such as the Biennale di Venezia and the Istanbul Biennale in 2007.

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Abdessemed works mainly as an installation or as a video artist ; In his work he takes up controversial topics and confrontations that remain ambivalent in their statement and sometimes have a disturbing or shocking effect on the audience. In Abdessemed's sculptural works, such tension is created through dimensions, deformations, or materials that do not seem compatible with the depicted motif or place it in a different context. These include Abdessemed's best-known work Habibi (2003/2004), a 17-meter-long replica of a human skeleton that is suspended in the air and symbolically “driven” by an aircraft turbine, as well as a model of the RMS Queen Mary made from old cans or the work Bourek (2005), for which Abdessemed gutted an airplane fuselage and folded it up like a dumpling. While Abdessemed traces the idea of Bourek back to a telephone conversation with his mother, during which she was rolling dough, the work can also be read with a more complex subtext; wrote a reviewer for the New York Times :

"[...] a sculpture so emotionally and socially charged that I am astonished it is here [...] It is a terrifying sight, and you can't help imagining that it just fell from the sky."

"[...] a sculpture that is so emotionally and socially charged that I am amazed that it is here [...] It is a terrifying sight and you get the idea that it simply fell from the sky."

- The New York Times

In his video and photo works, Abdessemed often uses animals as a motif to address danger, violence or death. For the staged photo series Séparation (2006), he let wild animals - including a lion - roam the streets of Paris. Other videos show street cats in Berlin ( Happiness in Mitte , 2003) and Paris ( Birth of Love , 2006) with their eating habits. A series of videos titled Don't Trust Me showed animals being slain with a hammer in a village in Mexico. The exhibition of the series at the SFAI in San Francisco was closed prematurely due to death threats. Don't trust me was also excluded from the Glasgow International Festival the following spring . However, other works by Abdessemed were still exhibited there. In the video loop Usine (2009) different animals like scorpions , poisonous snakes and tarantulas fight against each other. This work, too, led to protests and a lawsuit from the local environmental officer at an exhibition in Turin curated by Francesco Bonami .

In 2010, Abdessemed exhibited in a group exhibition on the subject of vanitas in the Musée Maillol in Paris ( C'est la vie. Vanités de Pompéi à Damien Hirst ). The title of his picture was Mes amis .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Press text on the exhibition Adel Abdessemed: Situation And Practice at the List Visual Arts Center (English, accessed on July 8, 2008)
  2. Press text on the exhibition Adel Abdessemed: Dead or Alive im P, p. 1 (English, accessed on July 8, 2008)
  3. ^ Habibi , image on the website of the David Zwirner gallery.
  4. Bourek , figure on the website of the David Zwirner Gallery.
  5. ^ Georgina Adam: Adel Abdessemed: crash landing.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Art Newspaper. November 30, 2005, p. 6@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.theartnewspaper.com  
  6. ^ Benjamin Genocchio: Adel Abdessemed: Dead or Alive. In: New York Times. December 7, 2008
  7. Kenneth Baker: Show's cancellation a rare case of artists advocating censorship. In: San Francisco Chronicle. April 1, 2008
  8. ^ SFAI press release from March 29, 2008 (accessed July 8, 2008)
  9. ^ Work removed from Glasgow International. In: Flash Art Online. (English, accessed July 2, 2009)
  10. ^ Ute Diehl: Scandal without an exhibition. ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Art magazine. February 26, 2009 (accessed July 2, 2009) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.art-magazin.de