First coming to widespread attention in 2000, the work of Adel Abdessemed has been generally understood as anintuitive and searing response to the convulsions shaking the contemporary world in its religious, political, economic andmoral aspects. The artist has been said to re-appropriate the primal powers of violence and destruction by creatingbraided aeroplanes, a rolled-up fuselage, burnt-out cars moulded in terra cotta, rows of barbed wire… Installations,performances, drawings, sculptures, videos, photos – Abdessemed employs multiple media to register the signs ofviolence scattered across the world, to capture the hubbub of history and render it in images. True as these views maybe, this book and the accompanying major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou offer a thorough reappraisal of them. I amInnocent shows that history in its chaotic, convulsive and conflicting forms is not the object of Abdessemed’s art butrather its material, which is thoroughly reworked, stylised and sublimated to the images of the world. Abdessemed’s workbelongs to a history of art that exceeds the narrow limits of the contemporary. Today’s world may supply Abdessemed with his raw materials, but he subjects them to dream-like displacements and transformations.