The show is called Rio, meaning river. I observe the world with the same fascination that my daughter, Rio, contemplates the big animals in the zoo that are thirsty and hungry. –Adel Abdessemed

David Zwirner is pleased to present the first American gallery exhibition by Adel Abdessemed. Encompassing all three of the main gallery spaces at David Zwirner, RIO features sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos made from 2008 to 2009.

The installation of the show envisages a maze of main rooms, corridors, and entrances that collectively create a complex yet harmonious environment. Visitors are given the possibility of several different journeys though the spaces, while individual works still remain autonomous.

The massive sculpture, Telle mère tel fils (2008), is the centerpiece of one of the galleries (519 West 19th Street). Over sixty-five feet long, the work is a braid of three airplanes, made of their original cockpits and tailfins, while the fuselages are reconstructed in soft felt filled with air.

Since moving to New York in 2008, the city has become part of Abdessemed’s work, and seen in the same gallery space is Lincoln (2009). Captured on a busy street corner, this photograph depicts a statute of the president, holding up and supporting Abdessemed. Lincoln echoes an earlier work, Nafissa (2006), where Abdessemed is seen on a Paris street being held in his mother’s arms. Other photographs include Saturday (2008), where his young daughters take dog skeletons for a walk down a New York City street, and Jasmine (2009), a street scene where a mother dog protects her multiple puppies.

Many situations created by Abdessemed are based on singular and deliberate actions, or, as he calls them, acts, which are testified, more than documented, with videos and photographs, and are often later juxtaposed with a sculptural remainder from the action itself. Another gallery (533 West 19th Street) is occupied by a group of works that represent this structure. In Grand Canyon (2008), Abdessemed dangles from a precipice over the canyon’s abyss and carves the single word “DEATH” into the underside of the boulder from which he is hanging. The two-part work consists of a photograph of the artist’s action, along with the rock, relocated afterwards to the gallery. Grand Canyon correlates to a recent work, Also Sprach Allah (2008), shown in a group exhibition at David Zwirner last summer. In this work, Abdessemed is repeatedly catapulted by a manned blanket toss in order to reach a carpet mounted on the ceiling. With each toss in the air, he adds a single mark on the carpet, eventually spelling out “Also Sprach Allah,” which translates to “Thus Spoke Allah” and refers directly to Also Sprach Zarathustra by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This action – demonstrating how a group can propel an individual to take action in the name of God – is documented in a video that accompanies the finished, framed carpet.

Reminiscent of Helikoptère (2007), is Enter the circle (2009). In this new work, Abdessemed is suspended upside down from a helicopter hovering fifty feet above the ground. In a motion that is both jagged yet fluid, he draws a complete circle with oil pastel onto a large panel. Seen in the gallery are both the video and the completed panels. For the two-part video, Les ailes de dieu I (2009) and Les ailes de dieu II (2009), a man without arms is suspended from a helicopter to make a drawing with his feet, while in the other video, a man without legs draws with his hands as he hangs down. In The Sea, another video that captures similarly intense physical movements, Abdessemed balances on a slab of wood on rough ebbing and flowing ocean waves.

Also presented in 533 West 19th Street is the seminal work, Practice zero tolerance (retournée) (2008), a large-scale terra cotta sculpture molded on an impounded car from the insurrections in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. As if upended by protestors, the vehicle’s charred chassis rests on its side, a symbol not only of the civil unrest in France, but of car bombings and suicide attacks around the globe.

The other main, center gallery space (525 West 19th Street) hosts a number of works, including Music Box (2009), a sculpture made of a steel oil barrel, which functions as a real musical instrument. Stationary pins on a revolving cylinder strike the teeth of a metal comb, producing sounds that fill the room: music from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). In Usine (2009), Abdessemed films an encounter between mammals, reptiles, and insects. Revealed in a quick minute-and-a-half video loop is both nature and mankind’s propensity toward survival and destruction. Prostitute (2008) addresses the theme of religion. Three prostitutes each meticulously hand wrote, page by page, one of three religious texts: the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran. These leather-bound manuscripts are displayed as closed books in stacked shopping bags, the completed activity quietly offered for viewers’ consumption. Other works, made with razor wire – like the previous work Wall Drawings (2006) where Abdessemed used razor wire in the form of simple circles that hung on the wall – are Soccer Balls (2009), placed throughout the gallery’s floors. Presented in between two main gallery spaces is the video Hot blood (2008), where David Moss, considered one of contemporary music’s most innovative vocalists, is depicted as a crazed pedestrian with a red clown nose who shrieks in the street: “I am a terrorist. You are a terrorist. Am I a terrorist? Are you a terrorist?”

Among new drawings made for the exhibition at David Zwirner are I take care of History (2009) and The best, the most, the only (2009), which consists of charcoal drawings (of hands and animals) inside notebooks, placed on music stands.