Eva & Adele are an artistic couple who claim to have "landed their time machines" in Berlin after the Wall fell in 1989, claiming to be "hermaphrodite twins from the future". [1] Both refuse to tell their real name or age. They are famous mainly for sharing an invented gender, which is neither male nor female. [2]
They are also known for their performance art, [3] they have been represented by an art gallery since 1997, [4] as they make paintings, video art, photography and costume design. [5] They also have their own perfume line and a watch with Swatch.
Eva & Adele are known to dress identically to each other [6] in matching makeup, bald heads and ladylike outfits. [7] They are known for promoting trans visibility [8] and take selfies [9] with many fans as part of their art project entitled "Wherever we are is museum." [10]
They have been recognized as the world's longest running performance art duo [11] and are often photographed as fashion icons [12] at art events, like Art Basel Miami Beach and the Venice Biennale. [13]
The duo claim that since they met they have vowed never to spend a night apart, nor receive guests in their house, without being fully madeup. They were married in 2011, after a three year battle to get Eva's sex listed as female on her birth certificate.
Eva (who is taller) argued to the court that although her body was a man, her soul was not. After reading numerous psychiatric and psychological reports, the judge agreed. Eva's birth certificate was then reissued with her sex as female. [14]
They are on many "best dressed" lists. [15] In 2015, they created their own watch with Swatch [16] which was released during the Venice Biennale. [17]
Their philosophy is called "Futuring," a belief that your thoughts create the future, similari to The Secret.
In 2018, the duo had a 20 year retrospective featuring their Polaroid photos, [18] paintings, [19] drawings, art installations and costume design work at the Me Collectors Room, a museum in Berlin, Germany. [20] They also had a retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne Paris in Paris, France in 2016. [21]
Their artwork has been called campy [22] and the duo have been described as stalwarts of the Berlin art scene. [23] They are known for looking like "a weird couple." [24]
From 1997 to 2002 Eva & Adele made appearances in the Channel 4 show Eurotrash as 'The Eggheads.' [25] They have been interviewed by many YouTubers and local European TV stations. [26] Many photos of Eva & Adele can be found on photo agency websites like Getty Images and Shutterstock.
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
The Brooklyn Rail is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The Rail is based in Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater.
Thierry Geoffroy, also known as Colonel, is a Danish-French artist, living in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a Conceptual artist using a wide variety of media including video and installations, often collaborative with other artists.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are artists living and working collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s.
Franz West was an Austrian artist.
Eva & Franco Mattes are a duo of artists based in New York City. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement and are known for their subversion of public media. They produce art involving the ethical and political issues arising from the inception of the Internet. They are based in Brooklyn, New York, but also travel frequently throughout Europe and the United States.
Fiona Tan is a visual artist primarily known for her photography, film and video art installations. With her own complex cultural background, Tan's work is known for its skillful craftsmanship and emotional intensity, which often explores the themes of identity, memory, and history. Tan currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art curator and an art critic. Since 2019, he has been director and curator of Acute Art in London, UK.
Riyas Komu is an Indian multimedia artist and curator based in Mumbai. He has invested his time in art education and developing art infrastructure in India. Komu's works are inspired by social conflicts and political movements and topics like migration and displacement. His hyper-realistic oil portraits of people resemble socialist-realist propaganda art, with one of his portraits titled Why Everybody should Look Like Mao.
Massimiliano Gioni is an Italian curator and contemporary art critic based in New York City, and artistic director at the New Museum. He is the artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan as well as the artistic director of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation. Gioni was the curator of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).
Michal Rovner, also known as Michal Rovner Hammer, is an Israeli contemporary artist, she is known for her video, photo, and cinema artwork. Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre (2011) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002).
Catherine de Zegher is a Belgian curator and a modern and contemporary art historian. She has a degree in art history and archaeology from the University of Ghent.
Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss conceptual artist currently living and working in Berlin. He utilises a wide range of artistic approaches including photography, performance, sculpture, and video to address concepts relating to time and human's relationship to the natural world.
Alicia Framis is a contemporary artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She develops platforms for creative social interaction, often through interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and specialists across various fields. Her work is project based and focuses on different aspects of human existence within contemporary urban society. Framis often starts out from actual social dilemmas to develop novel settings and proposed solutions. Framis studied with the French minimalist artist Daniel Buren and the American conceptual artist Dan Graham and her work can be located within the lineages of relational aesthetics, performance art, and social practice art. She represented the Netherlands in the Dutch Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). She is currently the director of an MA program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, Netherlands and a lecturer at Nebrija University in Madrid, Spain. In 2019, Alicia Framis was awarded with the Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellowship 2019-2022 in California.
Vera Molnár is a Hungarian media artist living and working in France. Molnar is widely considered to be a pioneer of computer art and generative art, and is also one of the first women to use computers in her art practice.
Samson Young is a Hong Kong artist, working primarily in the mediums of sound performance and installations.
Arthur Jafa is an American video artist and cinematographer.
The Belgian pavilion houses Belgium's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar visual artist living and working between Germany, Kosovo and Italy. His work is based on documents, stories, and memories related to the history of Kosovo.