NAME
Adel Abdessemed
Hope

‘Hope’, 2011–12,
Boat, resin,
205.7 × 579.1 × 243.8 cm

A wreck recovered on the coast of Florida was filled with rubbish bags of resin. Abdessemed titled this work Hope in an allusion to a shipwreck painted by Caspar David Friedrich, Die gescheiterte Hoffnung (The Wreck of Hope, 1823–24), whose title expresses the idea of disappointed hope. The tragedies that often terminate the voyages of desperate migrants in various parts of the world have now become a daily event. The weighty materiality of Hope, a real object, offers a stark contrast to the transient fluidity of media imagery.

Giovanni Careri