ROME.- Born in Constantine, Algeria in 1971, he lives and works in Paris, France.
Adel Abdessemed embraces a wide variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, performance, video and installation. His work often deals with the themes of war, violence and religion and is characterised by brutal imagery that attempts to depict the inherent violence of the contemporary world.
Memory, trauma, conflagration, intoxication, and lucidity: French artist of Berber origin, Adel Abdessemed has been building a committed and incandescent body of work for more than thirty years, which has quickly found an echo on the international scene.
He fled Algeria after the beginning of the 1992 civil war, taking with him the memory of the war and the range of atrocities. “I’ve experienced very directly the violence that I talk about. Even today, the wounds remain open and the questions unanswered: the arson, the rapes, the unpunished murders.” As the writer Kamel Daoud says about Adel Abdessemed: “You have to come from a country of origin like Adel's, with still alive terrible symbols, capable of real life and death, to understand that the artist's indignation is a necessity, rather than an aesthetic.”
Once in France, he studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Steeped in classical culture, literature and poetry, and with a passion for music, Abdessemed has appropriated various media and languages to make art the place where a society exposes its violence and fragility. Kounellis asserts that his vehemence is a bulwark against conformism and the uniformity of the bien-pensance.
It is this need to mix all forms of cultural expression that has led him to collaborate with writers and poets such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, Adonis, with whom he has published several joint works, but also architects such as Jean Nouvel and Jean Michel Wilmotte.
In the eighteenth century, Lessing made the cry the unrepresentable in art and the taboo of all visual arts. Through his work, Abdessemed has turned art into an organ of collective cry: an exercise in freedom, an exhortation to free ourselves once and for all from our barbarism.
Since Abdessemed’s first solo exhibition in 2001, he has had others at: PS1/MoMA, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA; CNAC - Le Magasin (Centre National d’Art Contemporain), Grenoble, France; Parasol unit, London; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Centre Pompidou, Paris (Adel Abdessemed Je suis innocent, 2012); CAC, Málaga, Spain; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (Adel Abdessemed: Conflict, 2017); Otchi Tchiornie at MAC’s, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; L’Antidote at MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, France .
Adel Abdessemed's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale three times (2003, 2009, 2015), as well as at the Biennial of Istanbul (2017), Havana (2009), Gwangju (2008), Lyon (2007) and Saõ Paulo (2006). In 2017 he participated in the Triennale di Milano The Restless Earth and the Oku-Noto Triennale in Japan.
In 2020 the artist exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris as part of the group show Crossing Views, and in March 2022 he inaugurated “An Imperial Message”, a major solo show over five floors at Rockbund Museum, Shanghai.
