“Sacred”: something dedicated to a deity, considered holy, or set apart for religious use, demanding high respect and reverence. “Decadence”: a state of moral, cultural, or social decline and deterioration, often driven by excessive self-indulgence, luxury, and a pursuit of pleasure.… SACRED DECADENCE When did you first drink absinthe?Mine was in May 1996, in the
What happens when the maker becomes the medium? When the gaze turns inward and the body begins to carry the narrative once held by the lens. For years, my work has lived behind the camera—framing stories, shaping light, and constructing visual narratives as a photographer and filmmaker. Through this process, I developed a deep sensitivity
From experimental video art to narrative arthouse cinema, my upcoming features Sick Bacchus and The First Hour after Violent Death explore the boundaries of storytelling, emotion, and visual poetry. As a filmmaker, my journey began in the intimate and exploratory realm of video art and experimental cinema. These early works allowed me to play with
Through An Ongoing Exploration of Identity and Impermanence Across the past decade, my work in avant-garde cinema and video art has traced a continuous thread through memory, identity, and transformation. These short films are not bound by traditional narrative structures; instead, they emerge as fragments—emotional, philosophical, and deeply personal—inviting the viewer into shifting inner landscapes.
We walk across collapsed burial mounds, along worn tarmac and salt marsh, through quagmires where black crows pick at the remnants of life. ‘THIS TERRAIN MIRRORS OUR OWN MOMENT. PAST AND PRESENT NO LONGER SIT IN SEQUENCE BUT OVERLAP, ERODING INTO ONE ANOTHER. THE CHALK CLIFFS, CONTINUALLY SHAPED BY PRESSURE AND WEATHER, REVEAL HOW ALL
Art is my practice of freedom — a rehearsal in being, in soft strength, in radical presence. In my series On Being an Angel, I explore freedom as a lived, embodied experience — especially the freedom of a woman who chooses to exist as an artist. To create not as decoration, not as permission-seeking, but
Freedom looks like disorder, It smells like decay, And still, it is freedom. The Scent of Freedom In the final years of communism, a system built on control, my grandmother—a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in central Poland—used to take me with her to work. I was a child, watching quietly. The hospital had been
Born during the collapse of communism, my childhood was spent between my grandfather’s cinema and the psychiatric hospital where my grandmother worked. I silently observed the fragility of human nature and learned early on that sanity is political and reality is negotiable.
Official Selection for the Intercontinental Biennial 2026 in Panama Poster for Sick Bacchus movie created by Aeon Rose at Ontology Pictures @aeon.rose @sickbacchusmovie www.sickbacchus.com Sick Bacchus by Monika K. Adler & Aeon Rose (Ontology Pictures) has been chosen from over 30,000 submissions for inclusion in the exhibition. Intercontinental Bienal Panama, Panama Museum, 24.06.-30.06. 2026 A
What’s on? Monika K. Adler: Chalk-Stone-White’ – 22nd BIEAF 2025 – The 22nd Busan International Environment Art Festival 2025, Busan, South Korea 01. 09. 2025 – 28. 02. 2026 ‘Nostalgia’ – Festival de Fotografia de Paranpiacaba 2025, Paranpiacaba Brasil (Foto Unica program) 13-14 September 2025 Patriarchal Sabbath (video) – The Retrospective Quito 2025 screening program
