The artist

The Travelling Players is a bas-relief in white Carrara marble based on a photograph showing the signatories of the Oslo II Accord (September 28, 1995) just before they emerged to make their speeches. On publication, this unconventional picture of the five negotiators had a distancing effect, exploiting the backstage comedy of a situation in which, despite the gravity of the moment, everyone is checking their ties. Itzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein of Jordan, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat prepare their entrance onto the stage of history, announcing a long-expected and decisive peace treaty. They have come to an agreement despite their differences, a point visually referenced by their identical gestures. Twenty years later, the transposition into marble of the photograph represents first and foremost a monument to the failure of the accords; Itzhak Rabin was assassinated barely two months later. Since antiquity, panels of low-relief sculpture have been a traditional way of depicting official history. Thus the photograph loses its ephemeral character even as the perfection of its construction comes to the fore: the king is at the centre, Rabin and Arafat are on the sides, and Clinton turns towards the off-screen space (here, the true stage). The stone image enhances the iconic value characteristic of any media image. However, the chronological distance between the two images has demolished this icon’s monumental pretensions by demolishing the fate of each of the protagonists, all of whom have since died or are no longer in power.
Photography is the art of the instant, of the stolen gesture. For a while this photo was able to pretend to the status of icon: a mythical image situated outside time, symbolizing a benign power working for peace and captured in its daily gestures. Abdessemed’s bas-relief thus demonstrates the simultaneous failure of the political accords and the media image, which could not maintain their aspirations of historical timelessness. Paradoxically, the artist accomplished this operation by employing the most eternal of materials, one used since time immemorial to snatch heroes and conquerors from the vicissitudes of human history.