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The Current Exhibition Has Been Temporarily Suspended

Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition Don’t Trust Me, which opened in the Walter and McBean Galleries on Wednesday, 19 March, has received numerous public responses concerning the nature of some of its content. In view of this massive response and because we wish to acknowledge many of the concerns expressed, we are temporarily suspending the exhibition.

Please join Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs Hou Hanru (the exhibition’s curator), Dean of Academic Affairs Okwui Enwezor, and SFAI Professors John Rapko and Tony Labat in a public discussion of the exhibition at 12noon on Monday, March 31, in the Lecture Hall on SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus.

SFAI would like to make it very clear that the Abdessemed exhibition is an instance of a long-standing and serious commitment, on SFAI’s part, to reflection on and free and open discussion of contemporary art. It is a typical feature of our educational mission to encourage our students and the wider public critically to think about and assess the world they inhabit. The video images in Abdessemed’s exhibition are images of events that took place—and regularly take place—in the real world. Their being depicted in video by Abdessemed is part of a long representational tradition, in Western art and beyond. It goes without saying that the motives underlying that representational tradition have often been to criticize and to question the practices of the larger culture of which that tradition is a part. It is of course up to each beholder of Abdessemed’s work to decide for him- or herself whether, where, and how his work fits into that tradition.

SFAI readily acknowledges that, unlike other representational forms (e.g., painting or photography), the medium of video can imbue such images with a particularly powerful, “real-time” quality—a quality that some people may find disturbing. Because we take such potential discomfort seriously, we posted a disclaimer warning at the front of our galleries in which we indicated the nature of the subject matter of the exhibition.