Performance, ∞, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

In the performance theirself herselves, the embodied voice becomes an outlet for algorithmically determined material in a feedback loop between the human body and a machine. Utilizing the Poem Automaton (2018-), with infinitely rearranged prerecorded phrases, words, and silences by the artist, an audio prompter enables the performer to hear and resound the results of the program’s arrangements, in an exercise that simultaneously confirms and abandons control of the artist’s role in the authorship of meaning.

First performed in various durations over three days in the performance festival Body and Building, at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, theirself herselves explores the situationist nature of spectator attention when confronted with the relentless productive capacity of a machine while its output is relayed by the human body.

Object, 𖨡 ANTENNE 8, Frankfurt

Sublimation print on polyester vertical blinds (photo of The Donkey Rider, 1912, bronze, by August Gaul), 360” x 165”

The organ responsible for listening also determines equilibrium. The ear hears while it keeps us balanced, informing the body automatically where and how we are situated and if everything is all right. Ears are a consideration of how we direct listening. How we choose to turn toward or away from voices or sounds while our own movement, our sense of balance – from the personal to the unimaginably vast political – is governed by listening.

Video, 28', Video City, Frankfurt

Digital video. Williams' Video City DVD rental history 2002-2022, in alphabetical order.
Camera and production: Sofia Igel. Sound Design: Contemporary Sound Berlin. Produced with the kind support of Peter Glanz of Video City, Frankfurt, Germany.

Object, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof

Seating Arrangements, free-for-pickup sofas, ink on cardboard.

Video, 2'30", Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg

Digital video runs as a continuous loop. The term, Donkey Bridge, is a German idiom for mnemonic tools.
Camera and production: Sophia Igel. Sound design: Contemporary Sound, Berlin. Produced with the kind support of Leo and Julia Malik, and the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg.

Object, Kunsthalle Lingen

An Arrangement for the Poem Automaton, and space for public reading. Furniture pieces are borrowed or bought and later re-circulated.

Performance, 5h, Trickster, Saas Fee Pavilion, Frankfurt

Newspapers are hung on all the windows of a space until the view is completely obscured.

Performance, 6', Preussenstadion, Kunsthalle Münster

Sunset as score: performed with trombones, tuba, and percussion. The Curve is a sound composition that accompanies the setting sun. It begins when the sun touches the horizon and concludes when the sun is no longer visible beyond it. The sounds performed move from a chaos of sound gestures toward unity.

Montez Radio, New York, broadcast from Preussen Soccer Stadium, for a festival of public performance works, Munster, 2019. Permanent loan of the collection of the city of Münster. https://www.kunsthallemuenster.de/en/collection/adrian-williams-the-curve/

Object, Kunstverein Braunschweig

Seating Arrangements, furniture borrowed or bought, then later re-circulated: in various forms of togetherness.

Object, ∞, Kölnischer Kunstverein

Poem Automaton is an algorithm that orders a growing archive of phrases and words recorded by the artist. Installed in an arrangement for the exhibition CUT UP, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein: Furniture borrowed or bought, and later re-circulated. Developed with Filip Caranica, Contemporary Sound, Berlin, 2018. https://www.contemporarysound.com/adrian-williams-en

Video, 20', Goldstein Galerie, Frankfurt

Naming is based on an improvisational theater exercise: the re-naming of objects to dislodge meaning and give way to new associations in the mind. In the video, Franz Von Saalfeld and Adrian Williams re-name Williams' photographs as they are laid on a table. (German with English subtitles)

Produced with the kind support of Atelier Goldstein, Frankfurt.

Object, Taylor Macklin, Zurich

Used shirts are hung in a former automobile spray booth. Counsel marks the transition between an object and its reproduction as images of the installation are archived and shared upside down: hang becomes reach.

Video, 10', Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon

16 mm, sound film looped (video to film transfer). A piano tuner in the act of tuning a piano “by ear”

Performance, 50', Tinahely, County Wicklow

Performed with a children’s choir, a brass band, and three performers utilizing, bells, buckets, gravel, flashlights and a collapsible sun. Acoustic gestures are set to choreographed movements, outdoors at dusk. Watering Hole, explores gathering and the physical shapes established by working in community, as an immersive soundscape that the viewer is free to navigate.

Produced in Tinahely, County Wicklow, Ireland, with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland, in cooperation with the Kilcommon School, Arklow City Brass Band, and the kind support of Music Generation on the occasion of the exhibition, BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, Adrian Williams and Elisabeth Clark. Music developed with Theodor Köhler.

Performance, 45', Neues Museum, Weimar

Audioplay performed with voice, viola, violin, cello, and percussion. Once Removed is a monologue, performed below sound drapes in a seating arrangement of borrowed chairs, situating instrumentalists within the audience. The play deals with the relationship between brothers as they face the circumstances around assisted suicide.

Produced by Ars Viva for the exhibition series, Truth and Reality (Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit). Composition developed with Theodor Köhler.

Performance, 50', Städelmuseum, Frankfurt

Performed with a children’s choir, a brass band, and three performers utilizing bells, buckets, gravel, flashlights and a collapsible sun. Surround sound acoustic gestures to choreographed movements, set outdoors at dusk. Watering Hole explores gathering and community as a literally immersive field in which the viewer is free to move within and around the performance space.

Performed in cooperation with the German Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and the State Radio Broadcasting Network Children‘s Choir (Hessischen Rundfunk). Music developed with Theodor Köhler.

Object, Palmengarten, Frankfurt

Fake Rolex in Koi Pond, stopped at 5:06.

Performance, 30', Artpace, San Antonio, Texas

Performed with eight players, two pianos, xylophone, clarinet, percussion, and various objects, Median Dogs explores the personal and structural challenges of political movements. Adrian Williams’ half-hour audioplay, is an exploration of decisions made for personal gain versus public interest. The performance utilizes the tensions created between music and dialogue to reinforce the fictionalized conflict of the total privatization of education in the United States. Collaborations with local community members, musicians, and actors in creating the narrative and music construct an environment in which the distinctions between performer and spectator are blurred. - Mary Wegmann

Commissioned by Artpace, San Antonio, Texas. Music for the play was developed with Theodor Köhler.

Film, 1', Kunstwerk, Berlin

16 mm, silent, looped
Ongoing collection of quotes crediting various authors for the same aphorism.

Drawing,

Object, Terminal Convention, Cork

The telephone is triggered by an exhibition guard to ring once as the viewer walks past the object.

Video, 10', Terminal Convention, Cork

16mm sound film (digital video to film transfer). A friend of the artist recalls UFO sightings and extraterrestrial encounters as they drive through Patagonia. The conversation was recorded in 2006, on a road near Rio Apen, Tierra del Fuego. (Spanish with English subtitles)

Performance, 3h 30', Portikus, Frankfurt

... Her scripts are transformed into audioplays in collaboration with the composer Theodor Köhler, and consist of interlinked musical and narrative strands; with each new listening, they give rise to different narrative images. Her work moves between the fields of installation, performance art, and theater... In the exhibition at the Portikus, the piece, subdivided into several chapters, was subject to ongoing elaboration over the entire duration of the exhibition; the artist worked with musicians and actors, performing each episode weekly. During opening hours, the instruments, sound objects, microphones, speakers, furniture, etc. that Williams assembled, served the artist and her team as a public rehearsal venue... - Sophie von Olfers

Performance, 45', Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

Audioplay performed with five performers, clarinet, celesta, percussion, and sound objects. Episode 1 is based on material developed through a series of live radio performances at a community radio station (Radio-X), in which Williams and Köhler's improvisations explored the relationship between music and voice during unscripted storytelling sessions. Told in the second-person present-tense, the audience is implicated in the story as mules, trapped in a world moved by unspecified goods. Material developed for the Episode series was reconfigured for performance in six parts, concluding in 2012 at Portikus, Frankfurt.

At Hand, Episode 1, was performed at the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt, in the exhibition, New Frankfurt Internationals, 2010.

Video, ∞, Kunstverein Heidelberg

16 mm, silent film (video). Collection of quotes crediting various authors for the same aphorism.

Performance, 20', Art Statements, Basel

Video as score for an improvised sound composition: various foley tools, four trombones, and gong. Tacit Grounds was shot on Great Gull Island, a former military outpost off the coast of Connecticut, currently a research station for ornithologists and a breeding ground of the common tern.

Produced with the kind support of Kadel Willborn Gallery and Helen Hayes with the Museum of Natural History, New York. Composition developed with Theodor Köhler.

Object, 90d, Athens Biennial, Athens

A container ship was moored in the yacht harbor of Athens with articles released intermittently in the local newspaper. As in a number of Adrian Williams’ works where narrative structures the arena in which a work of sculpture or performance takes shape, her project for Athens is “like an abandoned car stuffed with undelivered mail.” Williams’ material is not merely made of its physical components: a ship moored in the Athens harbor and a series of published daily news stories. Bound only by the limits of imagination and conviction, The Carrier, the artist explains, “becomes a vessel for the idea of what it may contain.” - Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Splendid Isolation: Heaven, Athens Biennial

Produced with the kind support of Uli Voges, Alexis Angelopolis, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, and the Athens Biennial.

Performance, 22h, Art Production Fund, LAB, New York

Performance with four players, melodica, tape recorder, and various foley tools. Batsong, Rehearsals for an Audioplay, tells the story of a singer plagued by the inability to hear her own voice objectively. The audioplay is presented in segments of dialogue, monologue, and third-person narrative combined with various acoustic actions: footsteps, rain sounds, clocks, a percolator, music, etc. Sound and text are combined, shuffled, and reassembled continuously. The performance took place in Art Production Fund’s LAB, a temporary repurposed commercial space in SoHo, as an eleven day public rehearsal in which the material was explored publicly before a fluctuating audience without explicit rules for engagement.

Commissioned by Art Production Fund, curated by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.

Performance, 10', Städelmuseum, Frankfurt

Film as score: 16 mm, silent film (video to film transfer), with live accompaniment: viola, violin, and double bass. In Albatross Ado, a house is being moved through town. Shot in Ushuaia, Argentina, 2005. Composition developed with Theodor Köhler.

Social, ∞, National Library of Kosova, Pristina

Initiated by Shannon Bool and Adrian Williams, the Contemporary Library is a collection of contemporary art books and artist editions housed within the National Library of Kosovo, and is currently maintained by local artists. During the Kosovo War, the building was occupied as a military command post and many of the library's holdings were damaged and lost, leading to a deficit in haptic art resources. This collection is a response to that deficit. To acquire resources, mailing lists from German art institutions were used to contact thousands of working artists and fellow institutions. Contributors were asked each to submit one catalog or book specific to their person or institution, along with an accompanying resource, which they considered fundamental to an arts library. Some resources are duplicate or triplicate within the collection, such as James Joyce‘s "Ulysses" and James Baldwin's, "Giovanni's Room," which reflect their relevance for the practitioners who submitted them, and are linked to their donors through labels. The collection contains: monographies, exhibition catalogs, literature, films, music, periodicals, rare objects, and artist editions.

This collection was established through the generous contributions of practitioners, publishers, art institutions, and academies worldwide. It is maintained through the continuing support and interest of the art community in Pristina, along with infrastructure provided by the National Library of Kosovo.