Mon Enfant: Adel Abdessemed

The title, Mon Enfant ["My Child"], carries emblematic resonances which inform the ongoing linkage Abdessemed undertakes between a personal history and a political archeology of the present. Abdessemed draws a line between collective memory and lived experience, putting into play an essential interrogation of humanity that crosses politics and contemporary history as much as it pertains to events in his own biography.

 

The exhibition's eponymous work is an ivory sculpture of a boy captured with his arms raised – a three-dimensional replica of the famously tragic photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto. This is the second work Abdessemed has realised in ivory, of about the same height as his nine year old daughter – also the presumed age of the victim depicted in the photograph. In the exhibition it is surrounded by Personne, a group charcoal drawings of dogs carrying human hands in their jaws. Each dog is equally an individual entity – a Personne – having seized the body parts of humans.