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  • HOME
  • About
    • CV
    • Contact
  • Exhibition
    • Installation
    • Paperwork
    • Photography
    • One-on-One
  • Theater
    • Repertoire
    • Fashion performance
    • Costume Design
    • Makeup
  • Texts
  • Workshop
    • Class
    • Séance
    • School of Disobedience
  • Shop
    • Books >
      • Mirror Book
      • My Masturbation Diary
      • Pussy Love Book I.
      • Pussy Love Book II.
      • Pussy Love Book III.
      • Dream Book
      • Regret, Remorse, Dream
    • Drawings >
      • Album of Lost Loves
      • Genealogies
    • Fashion >
      • Love Jacket
ÁDÁM ANNA
Picture
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1983, and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2016, I am an interdisciplinary visual artist working within the expanded fields of performance art, community activism, and choreography. Based on trans-disciplinary research and collective experimentation, I create and curate non-judgmental and non-hierarchical political soft-spaces for women empowerment, where self-liberation embraces care, empathy, and independence. I have been working for the company Gray Box (France) as a choreographer since 2018, where I am also responsible for the educational programs and research.

Sustainable community building

I consider community activism as part of my main artistic medium. I created the “School of Disobedience”, an experimental, anti-canonical and radical Performance Art School, Fight Club and Healing Centre, only for a FLINTA (female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, agender) audience. Through empowerment methods, guerilla tactics and community building- and organizing-practices, participants are encouraged to raise their voice, echo freely the broader socio-political context, challenge hegemonic class, gender, normative behaviors, and dominant ideologies, develop their capacities to resist, protest, revolt, fight against oppression: achieve structural and sustainable changes. The “School of Disobedience” wants to be a new form of resistance, an anti-fast art, a collective healing garden, an ode for sincerity and courage, a passionate and radical platform for simple actions and small changes.
The “School of Disobedience” is a “travelling school”, pop-up and nomadic, constantly in movement, because this is the only way which allows me to  think local and act local, share and care​. In response to the invitation of artistic and cultural venues from Europe and South Asia (museum, theatre, art gallery, residency, artist run space...), I regularly “dislocate” the school and transform their “hard” structure into a “soft” community space of radical experimentation, research, and creation. In the last 12 months, I opened the doors of the “School of Disobedience” inside of the Abbaye de Maubuisson Centre d'Art Contemporain (France), Art Cologne (Germany), Dance City Theatre Newcastle (UK), Le BAMP (Belgium), Autumn Festival (Hungary), ISBN Gallery (Hungary), A4 Theatre (Slovakia), Klara i Rosa (Serbia) to name a few, for a period between one day to one month.

Choreography as immersive collage making
I am interested in how anti-canonical and anti-contemporary aesthetics, “non-dance dance” and “non-art art” can be used as a means of opposition to challenge class hierarchies, and how they can become a tool in the struggle against normative behaviors and dominant ideologies. Coming from the visual arts, I practiced the technique of collage for years. Today, as a performance maker I still use this technique, except that I am creating compositions not on paper but in space. My solo performances can both be considered as single ones, but put together, they compose one. I arrange my solos in space and time as if they were “cut-outs”, I reconsider them as fragments of a whole, part of a coherent composition both in terms of concept and aesthetic.

Art education conceived as a critical practice
I also hold workshops, trainings, formal and informal classes both for professionals, amateurs, kids and adults. My methodology, "art-based unlearning", and more broadly, art education conceived as a critical practice, is a cross-disciplinary approach using artistic skills, processes and experiences as tools to take an active part in the social and political discourse on women's empowerment and rights, and to enhance their emancipation by the means of education and art. The goal of “art-based unlearning” is to create immersive learning experiences via readings, discussions, creative exercises in various artistic forms (visual arts, performing arts, creative writing...), so as to make women gain new insights and perspectives, develop critical thinking and confidence. During the classes, participants have the opportunity to experiment in a safe, judgement-free zone where they can express themselves most honestly while receiving the support, knowledge and tools to grow confidence and strengthen their personal performance persona.

Ant-fast art: an apology for slowness, simple actions and small changes
I believe that contemporary art can be democratic, less exclusionist, more solidarity based and community-oriented. In my opinion, contemporary art that reaches its viewers only through mediation – for instance, with the help of descriptive texts, exhibitions or museum education workshops – is addressed not to the wider public but to a privileged segment of society. Instead of popularizing initiatives that endeavor to make art more accessible to a wider audience, I feel there is a need for reform towards a contemporary art that is more autonomous, direct, accessible, interesting, and open to a broader spectrum of social strata. I believe in a new economy of the performing arts: less fast, more local, more sustainable and more ethical, with the hope to stop geographical divisions, and to respond to the evolution of social and environmental issues of our time. By deciding to perform in alternative, remote, small, lesser-known and outlying places as well, I wish to free myself from the obsession with career, fame, glory, this race for novelty and visibility generates. I try to create and co-create my projects with and for the inhabitants, the users and the local associative fabric in order to create bridges between those who have access to art and those who do not. I believe that art can be used as a tool for social justice, that art can make the difference.

In both exhibition spaces and theaters
I also worked as a performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...), today I present my own projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Ludwig Museum, Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Institut Français…) in major cities and small towns alike, in formal and informal, indoor and outdoor spaces. I have been in-residence with many theaters (Dance City Theater Newcastle (UK), Zagreb Dance Company (Croatia), ZFin Malta Dance Company (Malta), art spaces and universities (Artois University), through Europe. I also have a significant teaching experience in both formal and non-formal art and performance education (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT), Conservatory of Dance and Choreography (AM), University of Novi Sad (SRB), Mediterranean Dance Center (HT)...).

© 2022 ANNA ÁDÁM. All rights reserved.