No Smoking, 2012

Abdessemed Adel   Emerging artists

Adel Abdessemed (born 2 March 1971, Constantine, Algeria) is a French conceptual artist. He works and lives in Paris and London.

Adel Abdessemed began his artistic production in Batna (1986-1990), then in Algiers, in the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, from where he left in 1994 consequently to the assassinate of the director Ahmed Asselah, and his son, inside the school.

Afterwards he lives and works in Lyon (École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1994-1998), Paris (Cité internationale des arts, 1999-2000), New York (P.S.1 Scholarship, 2000-2001), Berlin (2002-2004), Paris (2005-2008), New York (2009), Paris (from 2010 to nowadays).

Artist Adel Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology or medium—he works across video, animation, performance, and sculptural installation. He passionately tackled religious, sexual and hallucinogenic taboos subjects in his early works and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence.

Although some consider his work to be performative, Abdessemed aggressively rejects this terminology, preferring simply to call his works “acts," recognizing the term's political implications. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, “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."