Art Review - March Issue - (Page 90)
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RAPPOLT Adel Abdessemed Practice Zero Tolerance, 2006 installation view,
La Criée Centre d’Art de Rennes , terra cotta, 365 x 165 x 120 cm.
Photo: Marc Domage. © Adel Abdessemed. Private collection. Courtesy the
artist and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris – which spans video,
photography, animation, sculpture and installation – is a rush. In the
case of Schnell 2005 , literally. That piece consists of 11 seconds of
looped video footage, shot during the time it took a video camera to fall
from a helicopter hovering 700 metres above Berlin. At once an Icarian
plummet, a dizzying bewilderment of the senses and a vertiginous leap into
the void that outdoes Yves Klein’s celebrated photograph of himself
flying out a window, the work is the perfect introduction to the
thirty-six-year-old Algerian’s oeuvre. And in contrast to the rapid
death-dive this work describes, Abdessemed, who now lives between Paris
and Berlin, is an artist on the rise. While the themes of Schnell appear
in a number of other works – Habibi 2003 , in which a giant skeleton,
suspended above the ground in Superman pose, appears to be flying out of,
or being sucked into, the fans of a jet engine, or Bourek 2005 , in which a
flattened aeroplane fuselage is rolled up like a traditional oriental
pastry – Abdessemed’s relatively simple works gather up a sometimes
bewildering array of references. Perhaps his most famous piece, God Is
Design 2005 , is an animation, in which 3,050 relatively simple drawings
of biological signs and Jewish and Islamic religious symbols morph, merge,
multiply and mutate like so many rampant, hyperactive cells. Replete with
references to disease and infection, as well as the possibilities for
cross-fertilisation and coexistence, the work is the perfect metaphor for
our transnational world. Following an appearance at the last Venice
Biennale, a nomination for the 2006 Prix Marcel Duchamp and, also last
year, his first solo institutional show, at Paris’s Le Plateau,
Abdessemed is attracting a growing number of fans. Chief among them is the
world’s number one collector – François Pinault – who bought
Practice Zero Tolerance 2006 , a Charles Ray-like ceramic replica of a
burnt-out Renault that is an overt reference to the riots in the suburbs
of Paris at the time, and a more covert reference to suicide bombings in
the Middle East. Another seamless fusion of aesthetics and politics, like
much of the artist’s work, Practice Zero Tolerance occupies a position
between two poles: in this case the ‘zero tolerance’ of the title
refers to the policies of those seeking to punish the perpetrators of acts
of vandalism as France’s Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy famously used
it or functions as an explanation of what motivates the kind of
pyromaniacal protest that produced Abdessemed’s model. However you
choose to read it, Abdessemed has produced another striking monument of
our times. AT FIRST GLANCE, ADEL ABDESSEMED’S WORK p 83-90 Future Greats
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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