b.1971, Constantine

“Up and at ‘em – that’s how you attack an unopened fruit…” Adel Abdessemed practices art as the undertaking of radical and truthful acts. This commitment involves risk. Abdessemed has stoked public ire as well as invited institutional banning. The artist’s exhibition was closed early in San Francisco (2008), a work withdrawn in Lyon (2018). In October 2017, the Guggenheim in New York pulled three of his works from the exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World before its opening. Few artists risk separation from both pillars, audience and patron, in the performance of their duty to hold a mirror to society. Abdessemed refuses to look away, however grotesque the reflection. He went into exile from Algeria in 1994 during the Civil War after the progressive director of his alma mater was murdered by militants on the art school’s steps. Relocating from Lyon to New York to Paris, Abdessemed became an international wanderer, curated prolifically onto the Biennale circuit across multiple iterations in São Paulo, Havana, Venice, Lyon and Gwangju, among others. Often, he recycled materials from the immediate vicinity in which he found himself. Aluminium cans were used to make works like the boat Queen Mary II (2007) and his Mappemonde series (2010–2014), the latter which removes the differences indicated by national flags and flattens hierarchies between territories by presenting all in the same colours. Abdessemed believes the artist acts as a witness first, without comment, leading beyond the miasma of fear created by media, politicians, working as much with the intimate as with the very large. Nothing less is possible when living in what he terms the age of un grand cri, “the great scream”.