The works in ‘Coyote’ are a series of portraits of the artist and her partner made in 2013-2018. The work communicates the intimacy of living together executed in the style of film stills from a movie. The piece employs the convention of the film still, whilst also being a play upon it. The characters and scenes depicted can be read as surrogates around which the viewer can generate their own plot, scene by scene.
The series references Joseph Beuys’ 1974 action at René Block Gallery, New York: ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’ where Beuys spent several days in a room with a live coyote. From this iconic work an entire series of performance documentation images were issued – later to form arts writer Caroline Tisdall’s book about the piece: Joseph Beuys: Coyote (1976). What is interesting here though, is that many of the images were in fact completely ‘staged’.
Here, then, we are looking at ideas of authenticity, appropriation, and the fabrication of narrative in both film and photography.
BIOGRAPHY
Monika K. Adler (born 1982), is a Polish photographer and film director based in London, U.K. She is currently working on her debut feature film Sick Bacchus. Her work has been shown in over a hundred exhibitions and film festivals internationally, including: Gwangju Biennale, Gislaveds Konsthall, Sweden; Cannes FF, The State Museum of Gulag, Moscow; West Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands; CICA Museum, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art, South Korea; Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio, USA; Edinburgh International Festival, BBC 100 Women, London; The National Art Gallery Wozownia, Torun; Poland; Facade Video Art Festival, Plovdiv, Bulgaria; National Press Gallery Seoul, Korea; Ilmin Museum, Seoul, Korea; Museum of New Art, Detroit; London Arts Festival; Films On Art, Portugal; EAI, San Diego; Zeta Art Center & Gallery, Tirana, Albania; Sobering Gallery, Paris; National Institute of Fine Arts, Tetouan, Morocco; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain; Galerie La Tour, Paris and the Second International Festival of Photography, Lodz, Poland.
She is best known her avant-garde filmworks and photography collections, which have been the subject of a number of academic studies.
instagram: @monikakadler
