Anna Ádám is an interdisciplinary visual artist and performance maker whose work blurs the boundaries between image, object, and choreography with emphasis on the body as the central form of expression. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and mask/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 at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual arts, and fashion. In 2019 she left the Art direction position of the company, so as to focus only on creation and choreography.
In the frame of her personal practice, combining photography, drawing, installation, clothing, fashion-performances, One-on-One performance, Seances, she conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre, the catwalk as a stage, and the theater as an exhibition space. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects 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. Anna Ádám also worked as a performance artist in commissioned works during her studies (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...), now she presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Ludwig Museum, Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Institut Français…), and holds workshops across Europe (Sweden, Hungary, Serbia, France, Armenia...).

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CURATING THEATER
​CHOREOGRAPHING EXHIBITION

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.
​In her solo exhibitions, curated in theaters, her drawings, photographs and installations act as prop or scenery settings, performances avoid linearity and narrativity. On the other hand, in exhibition spaces, she regularly creates One-on-One performances and Seances, in which she works with characters, develops scenography and dramaturgy, uses special effects, and creates particular light conditions together with complex soundtracks.

VISUAL ARTS

Stone, soil, leaves, and flowers: Anna Ádám’s recurring theme is the garden with its historical, philosophical, psychological, allegorical, erotical, and sexual meanings. Both organic and dreamy, true and imaginary, a place heavy with symbols yet devastatingly familiar.
In his text Of other spaces, Heterotopias (1967) Foucault wrote : “(…) the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space. The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity”. In Anna Ádám's drawings, photographs, and installations, gardens are structured microcosms, conceptual organizations of the inside and the outside, mirrors of the body and the soul, atemporal places of desire and temptation, interdicts, transgressions, and taboos.

PERFORMANCES
CHOREOGRAPHED WORKS

Anna Ádám creates performances (fashion-performances, One-on-One performances, Seances) and choreographed works questioning sexuality, gender, identity from a feminist and queer perspective. These site-specific projects echo the broader socio-political context, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped, and colonized archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.

One-on-One

Some of Anna Ádám's performances are One-on-One, and invite only one audience member at the time to experience the piece. These in-situ projects challenge the traditional performer/spectator or artwork/viewer relationship, allow the spectators to immerse themselves in the performance and gain a more intensive and personal experience, based on closeness, intimacy, and connectivity. 

Seances

Anna Ádám considers workshop as one of her artistic medium. At the intersection of performance, mise-en-scène, and training, in form of these interactive and immersive "Seances", she creates social and spatial contexts, develops new forms of collective aesthetics based on interactivity, participation, connection, and physical presence. Situated between relational aesthetics and new media theories of interactivity, "Seances" allow the participants to immerse themselves in a hybrid space, collaborate with the artist, who acts both as choreographer, dramatist, scenographer, and workshop leader, and therefore gain a more intensive and personal experience. During "Seances", following the artist's instructions, partitions, and scripts, participants realize exercises, execute tasks, and they are, without realizing, slowly involved in a performance as makers, performers, and spectator at the same time.

recycling memory

​Some of Anna Ádám’s works investigate the current meanings, impact, and affect of vintage, found, anonymous, and vernacular photography in relation to our economy of images, altered by social media and photo-sharing applications making everyday photography more immediate, shareable and visible than ever. Through different projects combining both personal and anonymous photographs with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery, clothing, edition…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences, shapes, and challenges memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, the social fabric, issues of authenticity, ownership, privacy and public life.

conceptual costume design
​MAKEUP

Before graduating in Arts, Anna Ádám studied styling, dressmaking, and she also followed makeup classes. As of 2015, she works as a costume designer, and as of 2017 she also acts as a make-up artist for contemporary dance and theater projects. Through questioning the original functions of clothes and accessories, Anna Ádám challenges the established codes of the fashionable body and standards of beauty. Her surprising combinations of materials, objects, colors, and forms transgress normative discourses, gender boundaries, and traditional systems of representation.

education

Anna Ádám also creates and holds workshops and trainings. Inspired, among others, from the Bauhaus pedagogy and from postmodern dancers improvisation-based working practices, she developed her own method of interdisciplinary collective creative process. Her approach uses visual arts, performing arts, and performance art as a tool to explore socio-political topics, develop critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. In her workshops costumes, masks, accessories, and makeup play a key role to question roles, stereotypes, and normativity.

Gray box

Anna Ádám co-founded Gray Box in 2014 in Berlin. Based on interdisciplinary, research based-collaborations, and collective creative process, Gray Box aims to experiment with the interactions and common territories of visual arts, performance art, and fashion: "White Cube", "Black Box", and "Catwalk". In 2019 she left the Art direction position of the company, so as to focus only on creation and choreography.