Artist
Anna Ádám
Anna Ádám (b. in 1983) is a Hungarian interdisciplinary visual artist and performance maker whose work blurs the boundaries between image, object, and choreography. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and makeup (2018). In 2013 she was selected to the 59th Salon de Montrouge, which led her to several solo exhibitions (Budapest, Paris) and residencies (Yerevan and Berlin). In 2014, she co-founded the company Gray Box (grayboxprojects.com) at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual arts, and fashion.
Since 2015, in the frame of her personal practice (www.annaadam.net), Anna Ádám creates hybrid spaces where spectacle and exhibition merge: she "curates theater" and "choreographs exhibitions". She conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre and the theater as an exhibition space: the plinth as stage, the installation as setting, the visitor as spectator, and vice versa. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects - including photography, drawing, installation, clothing, performances, and choreographed works - echo the broader socio-political context from a feminist and queer perspective, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.
As a photographer, by combining both personal and anonymous photos with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, privacy and public life. Her embroidered photographs, photo-objects, and photo-based clothings explore the performative, choreographic, and sculptural potential of photography.
Between 2013 and 2015, Anna Ádám worked as a performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...). Since 2014 she regularly presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of Immigration History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Théâtre de la Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, Salon de Montrouge, Galérie YGREC, Dorothy’s Gallery…), and holds workshops in universities across Europe (Austria, Hungary, Serbia, France...).
My Genesis Story
Analogue photography series in variable size, created in 2018.
Utopia/Dystopia
Analogue photography series in variable sizes, created in 2017.
Anna Ádám has a rich practice, merging her various interests into an aesthetically driven installation, somewhere between the kitsch and the contemporary. I believe the jury was attracted to her unique performative practice and its potential beyond the photographic.
Set in the studio, the work of Krystyna Bilak is carefully constructed, its presence controlled, the location measured; she builds stories where only selected elements are added as contributors to the narration. Everything is precise, and the results are astonishing. I was particularly glad to discover her practice, that I hope to present in Ireland soon.
Kata Geibl‘s practice exudes visual sophistication, with well-researched and carefully constructed bodies of work such as Sisyphus. Here, a pseudo-scientific vocabulary makes the images intriguing, while the project itself questions our almost religious admiration for Science. It would not be hard to see this work exhibited widely.
Olga Kocsi‘s practice based research is hyper-playful, demonstrating the modus operandi of an artist whose everyday is questioned oftentimes with amusing results. I enjoyed her video works specifically, with her witty humour and conceptual approach.
Adél Koleszár has focused her practice on bringing us closer into Mexican crime-related violence and their religious views, in New Routes of Faith. Closer, not to see the fresh wounds bleeding, but the human side; to see the misery and the sublime in the everyday life, with a personal approach that evidences what she is capable of. It would be interesting to see where she puts her ambition next, she is certainly one to follow.
Angel Luis Gonzalez, CEO PhotoIreland Foundation