Les Ailes de Dieu (The Wings of God) is the first solo exhibition in Italy for French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed (b. 1971 Costantine).
The exhibition, curated by Francesco Bonami, features a powerful line up of provocative video, photography and installation works of a powerful and subversive nature. Abdessemed has earned the title of enfant terrible since the beginning of his career for the shocking, controversial content of his works, often based on sensitive themes such as sex, religion and politics.
In a very raw, direct language, Abdessemed tells stories of violence and gives voice to the upset provoked by racial, religious, social and geographical differences, illustrating a contemporary society inflicted by abuse of power and aggression.
He sets the scene with fierce works of great visual and emotional impact, reminding us of the terrors and fears brought about by our war-struck modern culture.
The main character in the video Trust Me, 2007 is the singer David Moss who impersonates a vampire whilst singing different national anthems. Moss appears again in Hot Blood, 2008, wearing a clown’s nose and singing “I am a terrorist, you are, you I, am I, am I a terrorist?”
The central issues in his work are integration, racism, sexuality and the overcoming of strong taboos imposed by the religions that he interprets in a cross-sectional manner, expressed through a variety of media, from video and photography, drawing and painting, to performance and installation. He undresses a young Muslim woman, showers milk over a black-skinned face and registers acts of free love in public.
The ferocity of animals and the violence that man bestows upon them is a strong theme in his work. Abdessemed brings wild animals from North Africa, such as wild bores (Sept Frères, 2006), a snake (Zéro Tolérance, 2006) and a lion (Séparation, 2006), to the city streets of Paris and photographs them.
In the video installation Don’t Trust me, 2008, six video loops portray animals bludgeoned to death, documenting a practice that is still used in the slaughterhouses of the Mexican countryside.
As well as representing a form of political stance and refusal to accept life’s restrictions, Abdessemed’s works bring out evocative and intense representations of reality, transmitting the true instability caused by terror and creating a strong tension between the aesthetics of an image and the violence in the idea that it projects. A strong sense of this comes out in the work entitled Practice Zero Tolerance (renversée), 2008, which is a life-size terracotta cast of the hulk of a burned-out car, abandoned and tipped onto one side.
Adel Abdessemed was born in Constantine, Algeria in 1971 where, in 1992, the Algerian military violently overturned democracy and seized power. In 1994, he left his country and moved to France. Today, he lives and works in New York.
