A cry, the entire oeuvre of Adel Abdessemed is nothing but a cry. A cry against the cruelty of the world and the ferocity of humankind. A cry uttered as if stabbing space itself, with sabers or swords—from which he has created impressive (but hardly impressionistic) bouquets of Water Lilies (presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015). A cry as strident as the squawking of chickens being slaughtered—the very chickens he staged, like condemned men engulfed in flames, in a video installation that caused a scandal (during his exhibition at the MAC in Lyon in 2018). A cry as sharp as double-bladed military barbed wire – with which he sculpted, among other things, his crossless Christs and his armies of chickens… “An active witness to history,” according to his own words, Adel Abdessemed (born in 1971 in Constantine, Algeria) is an artist who thinks and composes “works that awaken the conscience.”
Let us awaken our conscience at 87 rue du Temple, at the Galleria Continua in Paris, where he invites us to watch the flickering "short torch" of life, like Shakespeare's Macbeth. Like Ulysses braving the waves and the temptations embodied by the sirens' sweet song, he appears, upright and impenetrable, at the prow of a burning ship. Highly allegorical, like all the artist's work, this Last Video (2021) summons the power of myth while simultaneously disrupting the narrative structure: filmed in a fixed shot, the image becomes haunting, as does the deafening sound of the flames devouring the ship, which soon appears to us as the mausoleum of all the tragedies that have bloodied the Mediterranean Sea…
Far from autofiction, too, are the two little girls standing before a monumental bas-relief of charred wood made from compressed images of war: like us (standing behind them), they contemplate the spectacle of destruction… Television screen? Smoke screen? Funeral stele? We are trapped by our own curiosity… However, Tonight No Man Will Sleep , warns the effigy of our troublemaker carrying a burning globe on his shoulder… while upstairs, an enormous metal shredder hammers away at the relentless march of time. Threat, omen, warning? We won't be able to say we weren't warned…
“Out, Out, Brief Candle” — Galleria Continua
87, rue du Temple, Paris 3rd
Until January 7, 2023
Stéphanie Dulout
