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Adel Abdessemed : Drawings 1995–2015

by Adel Abdessemed

This three-volume monograph documents the work of Adel Abdessemed from 1988 to 2015. It features over 1,300 images alongside scholarly essays by prominent art historians and philosophers.

Accession 9783863359539 ISBN 9783863359539 Publisher Koenig Books

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spine_text: Adel Abdessemed Drawings 1995-2015 Koenig Books

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Topics and Themes

1. **Violence, Trauma & the Body**
Abdessemed's drawings confront the human body in states of extremity — suspended, falling, dying, or caught in acts of violence. The body becomes a site of historical and political trauma, rendered with raw economy in charcoal and black chalk. The drawings resist aestheticizing suffering while remaining formally powerful.

The book's central tension is: how does mark-making on paper hold the weight of bodily trauma without becoming spectacle?

Connect to books about: war art, trauma studies, body art, representations of violence in contemporary art.

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2. **Drawing as Political Act**
The two-decade span of drawings (1995–2015) presents drawing not as a preparatory or minor medium but as a direct political gesture. Abdessemed's practice treats the line, shadow, and trace as forms of testimony and provocation — what he calls the "politics of drawing."

The medium itself is the argument: the immediacy of drawing strips away institutional mediation and confronts the viewer with raw intent.

Connect to books about: drawing theory and history, political art, artist manifestos, conceptual art practice.

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3. **Identity, Exile & the Postcolonial Self**
Born in Algeria and working between Paris and Berlin, Abdessemed deconstructs identity codes and resists reduction to a single culture or ideology. Themes of exile appear as early as 1995 in his work and persist across the full span of these drawings.

The question of who draws, from where, and for whom is inseparable from the work itself.

Connect to books about: postcolonial theory, diaspora and exile literature, North African and Arab identity, migration and belonging.

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4. **Religion, Taboo & the Sacred**
Abdessemed's work directly engages religious symbols, taboo subjects, and the tension between the sacred and the transgressive. Works such as *God Is Design* (2005) interweave Jewish and Islamic iconography, treating religious imagery as unstable, morphing, and politically charged.

The book surfaces a sustained inquiry into what religion forbids, permits, and destroys.

Connect to books about: art and religion, iconoclasm, sacred imagery, interfaith conflict, censorship in art.

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5. **Global Violence, War & Political Uprising**
Across this twenty-year period, Abdessemed repeatedly returns to imagery of soldiers, war, riots, and politically motivated destruction. Drawings like *Soldaten* and *Lampedusa* situate his practice within real, named global crises.

These works function as witness statements — art as a form of historical record when other records fail or lie.

Connect to books about: war photography and art, humanitarian crisis, political violence, contemporary conflict documentation.

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6. **The Artist's Role in Society & Subversion**
The book implicitly asks what the artist owes — and what they owe resistance to. Abdessemed questions the social and economic position of the artist within institutional systems, maintaining a deliberate, subversive distance from both markets and ideological allegiances.

His practice is one of committed refusal: neither apolitical formalism nor didactic activism.

Connect to books about: art institutions and critique, artist as activist, autonomy of art, avant-garde theory.

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7. **The Medium of Drawing: Trace, Shadow & the Invisible**
The book's scope — 1995 to 2015 — allows close attention to how Abdessemed uses drawing's most basic qualities: trace, erasure, shadow, opacity, and the surface of the paper as a kind of void. His drawings are described as "traces, shadows, scratches, interstices, gaps" rather than conventional compositions of line.

Drawing here is less about representation and more about the limits of what can be made visible.

Connect to books about: drawing theory, mark-making, phenomenology of art, materiality and medium specificity.

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8. **Cross-Cultural Dialogue & Transnationalism**
Working across Algerian, French, and broader global reference points, Abdessemed's drawings engage with the possibilities — and failures — of cross-cultural exchange. His imagery blends Western art history with Middle Eastern and North African visual and political contexts, creating a genuinely transnational visual language.

The work refuses the comfort of a singular cultural address.

Connect to books about: transnational art, globalization and culture, world art history, cross-cultural aesthetics.

Adel Abdessemed : Drawings 1995–2015

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Topics and Themes