Brooks Turner on the World’s Most Shocking Artist
by Minor Wisdom Review
The Other Adel(e)
We are reaching a point in our contemporary society where, because of the abundance of art history, the manner in which we choose to create and present art is being reevaluated. The traditional mediums of oil on canvas, pen on paper, clay, plaster, and others are opened up through untraditional approaches to these traditional mediums. Artists use objects to poke into canvases, twisting the meaning of the canvas while still citing its historical and potent place in the arts. Adel Abdessemed, an artist born in Algeria but currently living and working in Paris, works with an abundance of media from video, animation, performance, to drawings and sculptures. His work explores sexual, religious, and cultural taboos across the world, focusing in on their implicit violence. To Abdessemed, the world is consumed by violence. In his art, he concerns himself only with exposing, using and meditating on that violence, rather than judging it: “I do not live between two cultures. I am not a post-colonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector…. In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else, I don’t do illusions.” (1) Often considered very controversial, Abdessemed is not afraid to confront and display this very essence of violence in his work. Through working with ideas of violence, he additionally confronts other contemporary issues of ambiguity and absurdity, stereotyped and essentialized cultural narratives and ethnicities, and how we relate to each other in the world. His work is unique to his personal worldly experiences, and thus, working at an intersection of Algerian and French cultures, he makes art that reflects upon the volatility of French culture, and the physical and psychological violence that erupts from any interaction between any number of people.
In a recent show at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC), Abdessemed presented a giant cube, about six feet by six feet by six feet, of taxidermied animals, boars, foxes, and many others, calling it Taxidermia. Here, he creates a tension between the minimalist, geometric structure of a cube and the incredibly complex, organic materials that make up the cube. Initially, one might feel disgusted by being greeted with such a huge cube of dead things. The artist wants this response. It addresses the relationship between animals and humans, a theme prevalent throughout his work, and more specifically, the violent interactions that are created through human use of animals. When asked in an interview about this piece, Abdessemed said, “At first I wanted to call Taxidermia decorative art. In middle-class houses, you find these boar heads hanging on the wall. I made a cube with taxidermy animals. The meaning has been shifted, and the piece becomes a different kind of decoration.”(2) In this piece, Abdessemed shifts the meaning of these taxidermied animals from their decorative intention, highlighting the violence that must have occurred for all of these animals to be in the piece. He brings them together, contorting and tangling them in a cube that accentuates the involvement of humans and the violence that occurs to create decoration. Further more, he addresses a sense of social absurdity inherent in the use of shot dead, stuffed animals as decoration in middle class homes. Through his use of animals, Abdessemed forces us to reflect upon human culture and identity.
Because of the intense connection between animals and people and the way various cultures treat those animals—as a friend, as a food source, as a mode of transportation, as decoration, as a deity—many of his other recent pieces have also incorporated animals to reflect upon our culture. In a piece he did in 2006 called Séperation, Abdessemed brought a lion, several wild boars, and a snake out into the streets of Paris and photographed them. By doing this he set up a tension between the metropolis of Paris and its view on the country of his birth, Algeria. He suggests that since “I, Adel Abdessemed was born in Africa, you, the viewer, must think that I live with lions and boars and snakes out in the desert. That I am out of place in this city.” Here, he makes us aware of an immediate essentialization that takes places through western attitudes toward Africa that date back to colonialization. While his work does not attempt to directly approach issues of post-colonialism in our contemporary society, he nonetheless asks us to consider why we make such violent, soul rendering essentializations and from where these essentializations come. To stereotype or essentialize something is to cut away at it, reducing it to a term or idea that doesn’t reflect its full scope. This is violent and culturally destructive, and therefore of interest in Abdessemed.
Despite these clear cross cultural pieces, Abdessemed claimed in an interview that he was not a post-colonial artist, that he does not work from a space between two cultures, but invariably Séperation confronts these issues, specifically that of the violence of cultural collisions. I find that because of his past, because he once lived in Algeria, because he fled political unrest and the violence that resulted, he cannot avoid creating art out of a space of cross-cultural entanglement. His past brings more of himself in to the piece, connecting it to his personal cross-cultural, violent experiences in Algeria and as an immigrant into France.
In a piece he did in 2006 called Practice Zero Tolerance (cilo), Abdessemed further pulls his past experiences into this piece by responding to the 2005 Paris riots. Sparked by the death of two black children who were electrocuted when they hid in a power station to hide from an unwarranted police chase, the riots consumed the banlieue, a suburban area just outside of Paris populated mostly by immigrants and the impoverished, as those that lived there finally rose up against the racist and classist actions of the French state. The riots quickly became violent, and consumed the city of Paris as students and other dissidents against the state joined in. Responding to these riots, Abdessemed recreates a car burned in the riots in terracotta clay, capturing the emotional and physical violence and pain: the clay has been through fire, the same fire that the original car went through, the same fire that the city went through. Thus he expresses the state of French-African relations in Paris, or at least makes reference to the violence that comes out of the interaction between foreign cultures, the violence that comes in varying degrees out of every interaction between people.
In one of his most physically violent pieces, Abdessemed brings us back to the interaction between humans and animals, back to a media installation he did in 2008 called Don’t Trust Me. In this exhibition he presented video footage of 6 animals being killed on a farm in Mexico for consumption by a single blow from a sledgehammer to the head. This exhibition was so controversial that animal rights activists intervened and had it shut down. In this video, and in his other videos exhibiting violent interactions between animals or animals and people, Abdessemed shows us other cultural narratives that do not have the same laws for animal rights as western culture, and, in so doing, reminds us of the judging, and therefore violent, lens that Western culture looks through at the rest of the world. The only way I was able to view this video was through short clips that gallery goers had filmed upon visiting his exhibition. In each video, the viewer is so shocked and revolted by what is going on that the video drops away and the viewer leaves the gallery, capturing only a few brief seconds of the film. Abdessemed refuses to let us hide from violence, exposing what we see as unsavory actions of cruelty. We experience momentary horror and disgust, seeking to turn away, seeking to ignore it, seeking to refuse and forget its existence so as to make our own all the easier.
In an exhibition in 2008 for the David Zwirner Gallery in New York called Telle Mère Tel Fils, meaning in English “like mother like son,” Abdessemed presented a poetic meditation on a different kind of violence, a violence not filled with horror but love and respect for birth, life, and death. (3) In this piece, he suspends three planes each comprised of an intact cockpit and tailfin connected by a hollow felt tube in the air, twisting them together in a braid like pattern. Because of its massive size, it takes time and involvement to experience the whole piece. According to the text that accompanied its presentation, the piece represents “the interconnectedness of mother and child,” and alongside that interconnectedness, “the inseparability of birth and destruction.” (4) Berin Golonu of the Art in America International Review writes, “I would wager that it also represents the forceful collision of different worlds, cultures, ideologies, and yes, generations. There’s violence in such a collision, implied by the downed planes, but there’s also a great deal of love, influence and acceptance communicated through this dying embrace.” (5) Cultural interactions create a violence of displacement and entanglement that leaves both cultures changed forever. It is a beautiful birthing of a new and the death of an old cultural narrative. This piece represents our entangled world, forever violent in its encounters, but forever respectful of its power, of the love that emanates from it, from the volatile coming together of two cultures, two people, two atoms, like the relationship between mother and son. In this piece, Abdessemed captures this dualistic sense of violence, of life and death. He writes, “I always say that we have to be born, love, think, and die…there is nothing negative,…. For me, death can be a path, and eternity is a house. The paths lead to the house and vice-versa. So the question would actually be: which is more difficult, death or eternity?” (6)
At the intersection between two different cultures—Algerian and French—and the violence—both physical and psychological—that occurs in their mixing, Abdessemed’s experience of pain, horror, and love provide him with a perspective on the volatility of relationships between people and cultures. He presents pieces that use a varied array of media to suggest cross culture entanglement, and uses his experience of violence to bestow onto his pieces an oftentimes dark and shocking air. In such pieces as Séperation, Practice Zero Tolerance and Don’t Trust Me, Abdessemed uses horror to shock us out of our comfortable, self-satisfied hiding spot, to force us to consider violence, pain, and suffering caused by cultural and social interactions. But gently and tenderly in Telle Mère Tel Fils, he reminds us of the love and beauty that can come out of violence in relationships between mothers and sons, friends, and cultures. Through his work, Abdessemed exposes an ambiguity that exists in the world, a dualism of violence.
Brooks Turner is a contributing writer for Minor Wisdom Review. Brooks was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and attends Amherst College in Massachusetts. He is currently developing a body of artwork as part of a senior honors thesis in the studio art department at Amherst. In his art, Brooks explores themes of the uncanny, the absurd, and the subconscious through drawings of canyons and mixed media sculptures and installations.
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