ADEL ABDESSEMED
Drawing for Human Park
3 February - 27 April 2008

Adel Abdessemed has conceived his exhibition at Le MAGASIN as a homogenous ensemble of new pieces assembled under the title Drawing for Human Park, articulated through all the available exhibition spaces: the central space under the glass ceiling of La Rue and the adjacent galleries. In this “human park,” a symbolic image of a world in the throes of radical change, the artist draws the outlines of new thoughts and new concepts of situations based on actions and postures in which, as he says, “he jumps, starts, leaps, bucks, turns and twists.”

An image made during the production of one of his new pieces, Helikoptère, illustrates the invitation. Hanging by his feet from a helicopter hovering over sheets of wood, the artist attempts to draw to the rhythm and with the risk of the jolts from the machine, the wind and the swinging motion of his own body.

The resulting lines manifest drawing, not as an ideal representation of reality, but as an experience of perception, action and creation. The verticality of the body is thus radically reversed, offering not an exclusive, dominant retinal vision but a vision affected by the raw perception of an evolving space, of a chaos to be grappled with and explored with line. The figure of the spiral, of more or less concentric circles following the displacement of his body at the end of the rope, is a figure of chaos. A bomb crater or the centripetal eddy leading to nothingness and, in the case of a whirlpool, to drowning and death.

This drawing in black chalk is presented in La Rue, on several sheets of wood assembled in a shape corresponding to that of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. This very famous painting, a foundational work of Romanticism along with Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, domesticates horror, the kind of horror described by Kurtz, the emblematic character played by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, a horror that has a name and a face and that one must make one’s ally in order to survive and prosper in chaos. However the artist is a long way from such Romanticism or, as he himself puts it, he is a criminal romantic.

In Don’t trust me, which comprises six videos, each lasting only several seconds, Adel Abdessemed shows images of six animals being slaughtered in Mexico: a sheep a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat and a doe. The action is common and laconic, and the images are quick and untheatrical, without effects or dramatisation. The instrument of sacrifice, the hammer, comes from the symbolism of the forgotten power of a working class that has faded along with the ideology that claimed to serve it.

The choice of animals quotes the traditional calendar of the last bastion of communism, China, where the immense profits from its unprecedented economic development help shore up liberalism while the populations that produce them are subjected to various forms of violence.

The animal is at once the victim of a generalised horror and the symptom of a differentiation/resemblance that is also highlighted by Anything can happen when an animal is your cameraman, which shows a bride arm in arm with a gorilla.

Messieurs les Volontaristes is a coffin on a monumental scale – 18 by 7 metres – that the artist draws in space using metal tubes to materialise just its edges. The coffin obviously suggests the dead body, but also the end of utopias in the era of triumphant liberalism, which has created a new world order where the economy holds sway. Initially, the coffin was conceived as the funerary resting place of one of Abdessemed’s biggest pieces, Habibi.

For his exhibition at Le MAGASIN, Abdessemed directly underscores the identity of the space, a former factory, by covering the walls of its central space with kraft wrapping paper. As a pendant, Also sprach Allah shows a drawing and a video documenting production. Filmed, the artist’s action on a carpet writing these words while he is thrown into the air by some ten people leads to the production and presentation of this drawn text. The carpet that it presents is a transitional object, the transit from one point to another, without a clearly identified origin. It is like an aeroplane or a boat that dis-originate the cardinal points with their progress.

Also sprach Allah or the star in cannabis resin of Elle est cela cancel the different systems of representation of the world, which they demystify. The star in Elle est cela traces its form in order to differentiate. Like the vampire opera singer in the video Trust Me the score of which, a geographical line, quickly runs through the compressed melodic lines of seven national anthems (Russia, England, USA, Germany, Algeria, Brazil, France and the Internationale).

All these notions overlap, intersect and interweave in an ensemble where it is impossible to get an overview. Even if each of the parts of the weave can be identified and located in its progress, so that it is possible to lay down the foundations of a construction of meaning, the whole thing turns back in itself and loses any original intention. Telle mère, tel fils, the biggest work in the exhibition, over twenty metres long, weaves together reconstructed fuselages of three aeroplanes including their original tailfins and cockpits.

This knot of aeroplanes, of vehicles for travelling from a point of departure to a point of return, clearly signifies the loss of origins that comes with globalisation. It also explicitly pays homage to another mode of productivity that Abdessemed identifies with the figure of his mother, with her creative capacity to satisfy her children,, whatever the conditions of the family group at that moment, and whatever materials and tools were available to her.

The native point of origin is thus opposed to the loss brought by globalisation.

At  the occasion of Drawing for Human Park, Le Magasin publishes a catalogue assembling theoretical and critical texts and essays on Adel Abdessemed's work. Parallel to the exhibition, a monograph on Adel Abdessemed, Power to act, features a text by Larys Frogier analysing in detail each of the works made by the artist between 1994 and 2008, revisiting the (un)expected links with history and art – minimalism, performance, feminist art –and exploring what these works say about post-modernist theories of art. 

Adel Abdessemed  was born in Constantine (Algeria) in 1971. He lives and works in Paris.

Recent solo exhibitions: Dead or Alive, PS1 Contemporary Art Center New York, USA; The Street Is My Heart, Liberia Borges Contemporary Art Institute, Canton, China; Practice Zero Tolerance, Le Plateau, Paris and La Criée, Rennes; Conversation/ Sirha, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Among his recent group exhibitions: Venice Biennale; Istanbul Biennial; Global multitude, Luxembourg 2007.

Forthcoming solo shows: October-November 2008 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, Boston, USA - David Zwirner Gallery, New York, USA