Adam Geczy

Research

Adam Geczy is both an artist and critic/historian. His art practice has been dominated by multimedia installation, performance and video, although also encompasses photomedia and traditional drawing. Salient issues of his work include: political dissent represented in a non-literal way; the subliminal representation of horror; and traditional issues of love, death, loss and the fundamental nature of human tactile experience. Past works have engaged with the individual subject’s relationship to history; recent works have used beauty as a positive response to disaffection with social alienation. Another ongoing focus is both classical and electronic music in interplay with still and moving images. He also has an active ongoing collaborative practice with the performance artist Mike Parr, the composer Peter Sculthorpe (an Australian National Treasure) and the Berlin-based electronic sound composer and installation artist, Thomas Gerwin.
As a theorist and critic Geczy is nationally recognised with a substantial record of well over 200 articles and catalogue essays. He has been editor of Postwest, is a casual correspondent for The Australian newspaper and is regularly called upon to be part of gallery and editorial boards. He is co-editor (with Benjamin Genocchio) of What is Installation? (Sydney, Power Publications, 2001), co-author (with Michael Carter) of Reframing Art (Sydney, NSW Press/Oxford, Berg, 2006), and author of a monograph on Bill Seeto, The Thingness of Light (2007). His latest book, Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Oxford and New York: Berg) appeared in July 2008. He is currently working on three books: Orientalism and Fashion (Oxford and New York: Berg due 2011), Art and Fashion (with Dr Vicki Karaminas, UTS; Oxford and New York: Berg, due 2011) and a major edited volume of Australian and New Zealand Performance Art.

Significant Exhibitions

Significant exhibitions over the years have included the work on trauma and memory, such as the work in the major exhibition Body at the Art Gallery of NSW (1997), to From a Remote, Lonely Place (with Peter Sculthorpe), Adelaide Biennial (2004) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay (with Mike Parr), Art Gallery of NSW and Monash Faculty Gallery, Melbourne (2004).

Recent Exhibitions

Concerts, Lake Macquarie City Gallery, 2008

Buried Alive, a series of installations at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2007

Intermix (with Thomas Gerwin), Areal28, Berlin, 2006

Abuse of Power, Experimental Intermedia, Ghent, Belgium, 2006

Paris Requiem (with Peter Sculthorpe), Cité des Arts, Paris, 2006

Party Lines (live performance), at the 4th Dadao Live Art Festival, Beijing, 2006

I HATE AUSTRALIA, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 2005

He is also a regular participant in international screenings and festivals, including Klak! the festival for sound art in Kassel. In 2008 he was invited to undertake an open-air project Video Sculptures in Riga, Latvia. In the same year Geczy was included in the major exhibition Video Logic at the MCA, Sydney, which profiled several artists who have made substantial contributions to video art within Australia for over the last ten years.

Awards & Grants

Geczy has also been awarded numerous prizes, grants, fellowships and residencies, the latter in Berlin, Paris, Lyon, Ghent, Finland, Portugal, Latvia and Norway.

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