Sept frères
2006
Wild boars roaming the streets of Paris. This is the subject of Sept frères, a photograph taken by Adel Abdessemed in 2006 as part of a series of photographs taken on rue Lemercier in Paris, the city in which the artist lives and works.
Seven wild boars are released in the city. Six visible in the photograph, the last one out of frame? The strength of the work lies in its frontal composition, at ground level, as in a face-to-face with the gaze of these wild animals, intruders in this urban environment. Hypnotic, the work is both frightening and intriguing. Exploiting the street as a public sphere, as "a place of encounter with the unexpected", Adel Abdessemed makes it his studio, a workspace. Sept Frères refers both to the violence of the 2006 protests, and to the animality contained in each of us, the one that constitutes us and our relationship to the collective space that surrounds us. Would the spectator then be the seventh beast?
This work by Adel Abdessemed was presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in 2007-2008 during the exhibition "Passage du Temps" at the Tri Postal in Lille.
Seven wild boars are released in the city. Six visible in the photograph, the last one out of frame? The strength of the work lies in its frontal composition, at ground level, as in a face-to-face with the gaze of these wild animals, intruders in this urban environment. Hypnotic, the work is both frightening and intriguing. Exploiting the street as a public sphere, as "a place of encounter with the unexpected", Adel Abdessemed makes it his studio, a workspace. Sept Frères refers both to the violence of the 2006 protests, and to the animality contained in each of us, the one that constitutes us and our relationship to the collective space that surrounds us. Would the spectator then be the seventh beast?
This work by Adel Abdessemed was presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in 2007-2008 during the exhibition "Passage du Temps" at the Tri Postal in Lille.
Exhibitions
© Adel Abdessemed / Adagp, Paris.
