The emotional and visual impact of Adel Abdessemed’s work stems from its muted violence and its potent capacity for salutary expression, transgression and derision. In the eleven photographs and two videos on show here, Abdessemed reinvents the world and its animal violence. Showing exotic beasts in urban settings, posing in the arms of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in a New York street, or disguising himself as a gorilla so as to slip a wedding ring onto the finger of a pretty bride, the artist blurs the boundaries between art and private life, between self-representation and animality – and situates himself in that uncertain zone where our reality as human beings is far more complex than that of the civilised facade we offer to the gaze of our contemporaries and neighbours. In the two short films we see a foot angrily crushing a Coca-Cola can and a microphone. " Foot On" and "Talk is Cheap" are at once meaningful and highly ambiguous: comprising two rapid shots, they have a hypnotic, repetitive side that lays bare vertiginous horizons in the most secret fault-lines of our minds.
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