Adel Abdessemed

Since the end of the ‘nineties, Adel Abdessemed has tackled the “problem areas” of our multicultural and globalised world with great intelligence. He confronts politics in a very personal way in order to highlight questions of morality and identity, both in the West and in the Muslim world.

His work, which includes installations, videos, photography, sculpture, drawings and book-work, is always visually effective without being at all literal. A blend of references to everyday situations with literary, mythological and philosophical allusions and symbols, his art holds for him the power to transform society in the sense that it in fact opposes a resistance to the conventional or the norm.

Of Kabyle descent, Adel Abdessemed was born in 1971 in Constantine, Algeria. He studied Fine Art at Batna and then in Algiers. Forced into exile in 1994 by mounting Islamist violence, he trained at the College of Fine Art in Lyon. In 2001, he took part in the International Studio Programme at the PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York. 

Many museums and modern art centres all over the world have devoted solo exhibitions to the artist: MAMCO in Geneva, the Magasin de Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Heidelberg, the Institute of Art in San Francisco as well as the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London. From 2001 Abdessemed has also contributed to a number of biennials and triennials, which includes those in Yokohama, Tirana, Venice, Istanbul, Lyon, Havana and Sydney.