CURRENT EXHIBITION :::
Don't Trust Me, a solo show of
ADEL ABDESSEMED

THE ADEL ABDESSEMED EXHIBITION HAS BEEN CLOSED...
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Exhibition Dates: 20 March - 31 May, 2008
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 19th, 5:30 - 7:30
Artist Workshop: Tuesday, March 18th, 4:30 - 7:30
Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture: Wednesday, March 19th 7:30 (Free and open to the public)

A follow-up to his segment—the video projection God Is Design—in last year’s group exhibition Wherever We Go (also at SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries), Don’t Trust Me will mark Abdessemed’s West Coast solo debut. Including a site-specific performative event to be devised extempore, the exhibition features a slate of extremely short but provocative videos.

Looped cuts of only a few seconds, the videos offer up gestures and facts, but resist the imposition of narrative constructions or automatic interpretations (whether of the empirically unambiguous or the theoretically savvy kind). The tacit claims for “autonomy” made by such visual language—staccato forms, lights, movements, and immediate experiences—imbue the work with an instantaneous efficiency that circumvents categorization, making typical moral and cultural constraints seem beside the point. Don’t Trust Me portrays six animals—a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe—being struck and killed by a hammer. Each killing occurs so quickly that it’s difficult to determine definitively what has happened. Do these incidents represent slaughter or sacrifice? What are their social, cultural, moral, and political implications? Or are such questions now verging on irrelevance, as if something else altogether were taking place (or about to), something wholly other, unforeseen, unexpected?

At once intimate and spectacular, Abdessemed’s work aims to convert the banal into the dramatic. Transforming everyday materials and images into unexpected and sometimes shocking expressions, his inventive gestures, as if by alchemy, work to undo dominant modes of perception and entrenched sociocultural norms—they work, in short, to generate new relevance for radical ideas and actions. Actively defying social, cultural, moral, and religious taboos, Abdessemed contrives to subvert common sense and knowledge, received wisdom, and established biopolitical systems.

Within a wide range of media—drawing, video, photography, performance, and installation—Abdessemed’s artistic language is economical and straightforward; his range of references is open and generous, sensitive albeit controversial. For materials, he relies on bodily or embodied experiences (human and animal), ordinary household objects, industrial products, and even buildings. His work consists of the stark contrasts between beauty and violence, impulsiveness and rationality, romanticism and radicality, life and death.

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