Adel Abdessemed
Adel Abdessemed (* 1971 in Constantine, Algeria) is a contemporary Algerian artist.
Life
Abdessemed grew up in northern Algeria and attended there first 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 lived in Paris and Abdessemed temporarily in Berlin and New York, where he 2000-2001 on scholarship program of PS1 participated. Since 2004 he has been living in Paris.
In addition to solo exhibitions in France presented Abdessemed 2008 in Christine König Galerie in Vienna, 2006 in the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2007 on PS1; his work has appeared on several major exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Istanbul Biennial in 2007.
Work
Abdessemed works primarily with installations or as a video artist; In his works, he takes on controversial topics and juxtapositions that remain ambivalent in their statement and sometimes seem disturbing or shocking to the audience. In Abdessemed sculptural works such a voltage is generated by degree, deformation or materials that do not appear compatible with the illustrated design or put it in another context. These include Abdessemed known work Habibi (2003/2004), a 17 -meter-long replica of a human skeleton, which is floating suspended in the air and symbolic " driven " by an aircraft turbine, as well as a model of the RMS Queen Mary from old cans or the work Bourek (2005 ) for which Abdessemed cored an aircraft fuselage and was folding it in style of a dumpling. While Abdessemed attributes the idea to Bourek to a telephone conversation with his mother in which these just rolled dough, the work can also be read with a more complex subtext; writes one reviewer of the New York Times:
" [ ... ] A sculpture so emotionally and socially charged did I am astonished it is here [ ... ] It is a terrifying sight, and you can not help imagining did it just fell from the sky. "
In his video and photographic works Abdessemed often used animals as a motive to draw attention to the risk of violence or death. For the staged photo series Séparation (2006) he left wild animals - including a lion - running in the streets of Paris, while other videos street cats in Berlin ( Happiness in Mitte, 2003) and Paris (Birth of Love, 2006) feeding habits in their show. A series of videos under the title Do not Trust Me, where Abdessemed in a village in Mexico slaying of various animals documented with a hammer, led by death threats to the premature closure of a solo exhibition at SFAI in San Francisco. Do not trust me was excluded as well from the Glasgow International Festival in the spring, with other works Abdessemed were issued. Also Usine (2009 ), a video loop, fighting in the various animals such as scorpions, poisonous snakes and tarantulas against each other, resulted in an exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami exhibition in Turin to protests and a lawsuit of the local environmental department heads.
2010 turned out Abdessemed in a collective exhibition on the subject of vanitas in the Musée Maillol ( C'est la vie. Vanités de Pompei à Damien Hirst ). The title of his painting was Mes amis.