The conceptual artist whose solo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre created a big buzz is showing in Vence Museum, aided and abetted by architect Jean Nouvel.
Adel Abdessemed’s work leaves no-one indifferent; it has its denigrators and its champions. Born in 1971 in Constantine (Algeria) and presently living in London, this contemporary artist has a visceral need to challenge, a social duty even in his view. As always with him, the title of this exhibition at the Musée de Vence – Fondation Emile Hugues plays with words, cultures, ethics and morality. Jalousie in the singular means the jealousy that tortures the lover’s soul, while the plural, jalousies, designates the angle-slatted shutters that are a traditional feature of northern Mediterranean architecture, as opposed to the lattice moucharabieh used further east. Asking Jean Nouvel to design the display was an instinctive choice since he was the architect (in 1987) of Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe with its amazing frontage evoking the diaphragms of a photographic lens as well as those traditional lattice screens.
Black lines on paper
Together in this mediaeval castle refurbished in the 18th century they play with light and shade. Abdessemed is showing sculptures never previously exhibited in France. A barbed-wire Christ personifying agony, a sadly famous child out of Warsaw’s ghetto, a young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm-devastated paddy field... will surely return to haunt us. The artist convokes every religion to a secular high mass: Christianity’s vanities to the Star of David to an animated God is Design in answer to the religious ban
on portraying Mohammed. He has filled the
White Penitents Chapel, now an annex of the museum, with videos that include Solitude featuring a slumbering modern odalisque. We are minded of the Matisse Chapel with its open-armed arabesques, freed from all convention.
Jusqu’au 17 janvier
Vence,
2 place du Frêne,
Tél. 04 93 58 15 78
Adel Abdessemed, Mon Enfant, 2014. Ivioire. Courtesy de l’artiste et Dvir Gallery.
© Adel Abdessemed / Adagp, Paris 2015 / Photo : Elad Sarig
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