Adel Abdessemed's Dionysian Chaos at Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou in Paris hosted a major solo exhibition of Adel Abdessemed from October 3, 2012, to January 7, 2013. Curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud, the show presented a sprawling array of works including a horse sculpture referencing Nietzsche, a 29-second looped video of public lovemaking, a suspended boat filled with resin black bags, four barbed-wire crucifixes inspired by Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, a monumental sculpture of Zinedine Zidane's headbutt on Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final, a cannabis-resin star, a crushed lemon, a folded airplane referencing his mother's Bourek cake, a flipped black car, a terracotta sculpture mistaken for a burnt readymade, a world map made from scrap steel, a braided airplane, and a wall poem serving as an aesthetic-political manifesto: "I prefer realities to realisms / truth to hope / images to representations / substance to law / the forester to the woodcutter / vision to the frame / humor to parody / force to dispersion / space to the center / innocence to Empire." The poem, along with the transformation of "Exit" into "Exil," underscored Abdessemed's Nietzschean affirmation and refusal of metaphor. Michaud described the work as "an interminable attempt to gather and fix in its images the intensity of the powers that organize and disorganize the world."