projeckt
adel abdessemed
16 april - 19 june 2024
Adel Abdessemed is a contemporary artist whose provocative works in various mediums tackle global issues and societal contradictions. His art invites critical reflection, often through confronting themes of human rights and collective memory.
Nature Morte
Nature-Morte, a strange pictorial genre. A portrait of the deadly nature of portraits, a threatening and endangered beauty. Under Adel’s gaze, everything explodes.
This is his unique strength. The “Grenades”, when Adel mentions them, are seenby Adel. Immense, giant, unnatural, 220 x 270 cm, they strike us.
I am Gone
I Am Gone weaves the bodies of three aircraft whose original cockpits and tails have been retained, while the fuselages have been replaced by air-filled felt. This knot of planes represents an unprecedented marriage between mechanical objects and the artist’s folding technique, which she claims is a transposition of her mother’s art of folding thin sheets of dough into a dish called bourek.
The title reverses the saying that sons resemble fathers, and the same principle of inversion is found in the head-to-tail weaving of the planes. In an approach to folding that links it to Baroque sculpture, this work manipulates elements that make up the material reality of an aeroplane, while evoking fantasies of flight and freedom, rejecting the trajectory implied by the aerodynamic shape of the machines themselves. Completely pinned to the ground, transformed into great intertwined snakes, these three planes seem strangely alive.
CINEMA
An extraterrestrial object rests on a makeshift wooden pedestal. As we approach, we realise that it is a bundle of sticks of dynamite, including a clockwork detonator.
The bomb scare is foiled, however, by the object’s material and colour, which immediately inform us that it is a reproduction, like an archaeological artefact.
The title of the work seems to reinforce this line of interpretation, facilitating acceptance of a symbol of urban warfare and terrorism.
BRISTOW
The symbol of the pigeon is synonymous with metropolitan expansion, both as a vermin and as a nuisance symbolising life in the capital. But these animals are also instruments of communication, and were once extremely valuable in wartime because of their ferocious intelligence and ability to deliver secret messages.
Abdessemed manages to distil this sense of dread in Bristow, while maintaining a somewhat peaceful and meditative attitude. He captures an underlying menace that bubbles beneath the surface of everyday life, permeating even the most positive spirit. “My actions are always confronted with the loss of memory and the indifference of forgetting,” he explains, once again giving an insight into his position as an artist who reflects the world around him rather than telling a singular story. “I am what I am in spite of myself. My condition as an artist and as a human being is to be a witness to my time.
FEUX
Adel Abdessemed’s work embraces all forms, from drawing to installation, from act to video, to sculpture, to give us a sense of the intensity of the present, and “ignite” our perception, in the artist’s own words.
Rejecting any notion of the “end of history”, the artist transforms known or forgotten images into matter, and invites us to live the physical experience that transforms his art.
His works in charcoal, the material of nature and destruction, but also of drawing, are entitled Feux (Fires). These two spheres of burnt wood confront suffering with abstraction.
This projeckt was made possible thanks to the artist & Wilde gallery.