Adel Abdessemed

He met his wife in a bar in Lyon called L’Antidote in the mid-1990s, an episode represented in the small replica of the venue in a vitrine in the exhibition at MAC in Lyon.

Abdessemed's life-size sculptural variations of iconic images, such as the nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc (nicknamed ‘the Napalm Girl’) running away naked from an explosion throughout the Vietnam War in 1972 or the French football player Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final (Headbutt) are only two examples of how the immediacy of such moments take on fresh meaning when solidified in a form designed to make them still and everlasting. And even in those moments when the relationship between subject and rendition is a bit more fluid, as for example with the combination of the Antonio Canova-inspired sculpture group Is Beautiful with the terracotta-made, hard working men depicted in Sham, the outcome doesn't seem to change. This is not a literal representation of reality, but rather a sublimation of iconic images to art that takes place.

Adel Abdessemed is known to have a special way to laugh. While studying art in Algeria, one of his professors defined it ‘The Devil’s Laugh’.

Abdessemed was born in Constantine, in eastern Algeria, to a Chaoui Berber family. He grew up in the area of the Aurès Mountains, and attended the École régionale des beaux-arts [fr] in Batna. He then studied at the École supérieure des beaux-arts [fr] in Algiers. He left in 1994.

Between 1994 and 1999, Abdessemed attended the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon, in eastern central France. He then lived and worked in the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2000–2001 he was a resident artist at P.S.1 in New York. After spending some time in Berlin, he returned in 2004 to Paris. He is a French citizen.

Adel Abdessemed grew up in Algeria amid civil war tensions, and has been greatly affected by the media exposure of the Gulf War and its global impact. If the collapse of the machine and the first Big War at the beginning of the 20th Century contributed in no small part to the establishment of an art that was suddenly provoking and difficult to look at, the availability of images from the war front in the 1990s made the same process impossible. There is little point in trying to tackle brutality by denouncing it via a series of trite statements or graphic imagery. Adel Abdessemed stated about his work «I think my work is actually positive. The world is violent – not me».

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971) is an Algerian contemporary artist. He has worked in a variety of media, including animation, installation, performance, sculpture and video. Some of his work relates to the topic of violence in the world.