Adel Abdessemed

Adel Abdessemed was born in Constantine, in eastern Algeria, in 1971. He studied art at the fine arts school in Batna and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers. In 1994, during Algeria's civil war, the school's director Ahmed Asselah was murdered with his son, and Abdessemed left the country for France, where he continued his studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon.

His work is often uncomfortable on purpose. He has made life-size figures of Christ out of razor wire, a boat filled with rubbish bags, and videos involving animals that led to protests. In 2008 the San Francisco Art Institute cancelled his exhibition Don't Trust Me after visitors complained about six looped videos of animals being slaughtered with a sledgehammer. In 2018 his Blazing chickens were withdrawn from a show in Lyon. Violence, power and the images the media repeat are his recurring subjects.

How to look at an Abdessemed: ask what the object is made of before you ask what it means. The materials are chosen for their associations — razor wire, bronze, rubbish, fire — and the shock is part of the argument, not an accident. Then ask who is being asked to look, and what the work would be without the controversy that surrounds it. That reading is this site's own.

His most famous work is Coup de tête (2012), a bronze more than five metres high of the moment in the 2006 World Cup final when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi. It was bought, for an undisclosed sum, by the Qatar Museums Authority, which installed it on the Doha Corniche in 2013 and said it would be permanent. In October 2013 the authority moved it to Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, where it was shown in his exhibition L'Âge d'or from 6 October 2013 to 5 January 2014. One report says it was removed after a public outcry, with Muslim conservatives denouncing the work; others say critics called it unsportsmanlike. See our lists of Algerian artists and Algerian painters.