A major artist who came to prominence in the early 2000s, Adel Abdessemed marked the beginning of the 21st century with his incandescent, even provocative works, openly denouncing society’s taboos as well as the violence of our contemporary world, which he himself experienced during his childhood in Algeria before settling permanently in France in the 1990s. 

From drawing to photography, from sculpture to video, via performance, the artist plays with heterogeneous materials – bronze, barbed wire, dynamite, aeroplane wreckage, cannabis resin, marble – which he manipulates and reinvents in a wide variety of approaches, creating a vision of the world centred on the horizon of contemporary sacrifice, catastrophe and trauma.