Lise

I first met Adam in 2010, when I attended a performance, he did in an old warehouse space in Southeast London. He walked on a circling platform, reading a story he wrote, wearing a pink dress he’d sewn. It was the first time Adam performed as Madam. The event took place at the Wood Mill, a commune of artists he was part of at the time. They sometimes opened their doors to others to present performances, screenings, exhibitions, and parties. Soon after, the building was to be redeveloped, and the group moved out. Adam has been part of other collectives since and to this day continues to work closely and live with others. Life events inform the subjects of his work, and his work is, in many respects, a way of dealing with his life. Personal stories about love and loss, violence, sex and trauma intertwine with dreams and fiction. Reality and imagination continually entwine. Sometimes confessional and melancholic, others comical and dramatic, he turns his everyday experiences into theatre and spectacle. As years go by, Adam continues to develop various ways of narrating such stories, from writing and performances to music, films, and hand-sewn textiles. In doing so, intentionally, or not, his work grapples with much larger structures than his personhood, documenting moments in time and capturing ways of living in cities, modes of relating to oneself and others, communities, and how they continue to exist, regardless of the continually accelerated landscape of urban redevelopments and displacement they inhabit. The Death by Mystery series exemplifies this. The moving image series is the outcome of an intimate collaboration with the community of artists the artist lives with, where the filming of each chapter becomes an incentive for a collective come-together with everyone involved in front and behind the camera. Written on the day of their filming and shot in one go, in each chapter, we see the artist making and unmaking himself as his alter ego Madame de Dangé Laïm, while the camera follows him through different environments in his house-cum-baroque-theatre-stage. We collaborated on the first two chapters amid the first lockdown in 2020 for Nottingham Contemporary. The third and final chapter was developed for this exhibition. This new chapter departs from a story the artist wrote about the passing of his "second mother" Lise, his mother’s partner, who the exhibition is named after. A narration of this event is combined with visual references to Dario Argento’s horror films, and scenes of collective joy with friends. The work is shown in the exhibition as an expanded moving image presentation, where different scenes unfold as sound spills across the rooms in a scenography where various characters appear inside and outside the screen. Madam is present in the space, mediated through the screen, performing in loop for the camera, but also through their remnants left across the rooms; the red dress worn in the film reclines on a metal chair and hand-carved drawings can be seen on his make-up table. Other characters appear in different forms, on hand-sewn textiles and drawn with nail polish on metal panels. A duvet cover with an image of Madonna from her Who’s that Girl period covers the bed. Given to Adam by his parents when he was thirteen, it was in this duvet cover that Lise passed away last year. The different elements comprising Lise were produced in situ while the artist lived in the space. Lise is Adam’s first exhibition in Athens, presenting various aspects of his multifaceted practice.