Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

Inviting scholars, critics, curators and professionals from different fields to share experience and expertise, the "Walk and Talk" series intends to provide audience with more possibilities and perspectives to gain insights into the exhibition context and practice of the artists. This time we invite writer and filmmaker Ag to make a short film specially for the exhibition An Imperial Message. Drawing on elements from both literature and moving image, she shows her response to and imagination of the notion of "arrival" in Adel Abdessemed's art.

Adel Abdessemed began his artistic career at a very young age, producing works in Batna, Algiers, Lyon, Paris, New York, Berlin and, once again, Paris. Traces from the turbulent journeys and a sense of being "beyond arrival" are perceived in his works, like the boat moving aimlessly on the sea, the human figures seeming to be falling in the empty void of paper, or the pigeon perching quietly on a metallic barrier.

"Beyond arrival" in the geological sense can be measured in this way or another, but linguistic and conceptual approaches are more good at revealing the lost traces. Abdessemed apparently is an artist adept at constructing and representing uncertainties through different media, narratives and perspectives.

Different as they are, media try to delineate the eternal recurrence: film measures the transient through movement, and literature on the other hand builds the vessel of its own escape and burns it to outline conceptual paradoxes.

Does perspective determine the map of phenomenon, the directions, position of the center and velocity? To go or to come? Who will collapse during the process of wandering?

The Walk and Talk session will include a guided tour and lecture. Participants will walk through the exhibition together with the speaker first and then engage in an in-depth and inspiring dialogue.