Cri Cri

Adel Abdessemed’s work Cri (2013) unites material history and human tragedy in the form of a haunting, freestanding sculpture. The life-sized statuette depicts a naked young girl, balancing on one foot. Her pose is delicate and inexpressibly sad. With her arms lifted in mid-air, and one leg bent, the child’s eyes are closed, and her mouth gaping open in a silent scream.

The brutal loneliness and pain of this human subject is reinforced by the use of a single material, with an off-white colour, which gives a further impression of the child’s alienation, of being stripped bare. Although Cri reveals little by way of explicit references, it does have an additional layer, since it appropriates a well-known black and white photograph, taken by the photojournalist Nick Ut in 1972, as North Vietnamese troops bombed South Vietnam. In the original source photograph, four young children – among them, the young girl depicted in Cri– can be seen running down the road towards the camera, screaming as napalm rains down on them. When decontextualised by Abdessemed, the figure appears alienated and haunted in a different way, as if frozen in time. The work jars in its combination of the poise of a butoh or ballet dancer and a simplicity of form, with an invocation of pure, ghastly terror.

Upon closer inspection, the surface of the sculpture reveals small ridges, and an additional level of material history, since the work is made out of ivory. Thus in its sculptural form, in the photographic image that it appropriates, and in its material, the work speaks to the loss of home, comfort, dignity and life, and conjures the tragic timelessness of suffering and violence.