One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by
Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.
Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity
codes, tackling head-on the tensions that
permeate our society.
His works, with their
typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings,
photographs, videos and performances—echo
precise facts and familiar situations, but go
beyond narrative commentary and militant
criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among
other things, the social and economic status
of the artist in a system where his foothold
is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance
in a gesture of subversive and committed
resignation.
Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology.
In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with
Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial 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."
Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.
