about
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin as the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which I live and work, and their deep, ongoing cultural and spiritual connection to this place.
I pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, to their Elders, past and present, and to their country. Sovereignty was never ceded and settler colonialism is ongoing.
Adele Wilkes is an anti-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and academic whose practice merges moving image, sound, photography, projection and installation, with a focus on experimental and expanded approaches to documentary and storytelling. She engages the poetics and technologies of cinema to express perceptual experience and tacit knowledge.
Driven by curiosity and wonder, and informed by personal history and syncretic culture, Adele’s work is collaborative, affective and neuroqueer. Her practice counters dominator culture and anthropocentrism, following the mycelial, mutualistic relationships between the human and nonhuman and how they shape animist and ecological ways of knowing and being.
Adele’s work has been exhibited, screened, published, broadcast, and transmitted into deep space by organisations including National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Buxton Contemporary, Channels Festival, Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Artspace, Blindside Gallery, Aphids, Sydney Contemporary, ABC TV, Magnum Photos, Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture, Museum of Brisbane, The Hellenic Museum, Bunjil Place, un Magazine, Lismore Regional Gallery, Midsumma Festival, RMIT Design Hub Gallery, Melaka Art and Performance Festival, Entheogenesis Journal, and film festivals in the UK, US, and Europe.
Her work was commissioned for the 2023 Melbourne Now survey exhibition at NGV as part of the Artist Film Program; the Still Life exhibition and public Big Screen at Buxton Contemporary (June-October 2022); Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank (August-September 2022); and Artspace (February-March 2025).
Adele’s photography was shortlisted for the 2019 Bowness Photography Prize, exhibited at the Museum of Australian Photography, Victoria, and the 2021 National Photographic Portrait Prize, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, ACT and at regional galleries throughout Australia.
She has undertaken art residencies at Shiro Oni, Japan (2017), Centre for Dramaturgy and Curation, Australia (2019), Bantengan Nuswantara, Indonesia (2023), Pos Yum, Malaysia (2023), MAPFest, Malaysia (2023), and a photography intensive with Magnum Photos x PHOTO Festival (2021).
Adele is currently a PhD candidate and sessional lecturer in the School of Art, RMIT. She was an art peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts 2021-2024, is a founding member of Fruiting Bodies Queer Ecology Collective, a member of Women Photograph, and has helped run the ethnobotanical nonprofit organisation, Entheogenesis Australis since 2008. Adele graduated from RMIT BFA (Honours First Class) in 2021 and was the recipient of the Composite Moving Image Award and the Joel Elenberg Prize.
She shares most of her time between Naarm / Birraranga (Melbourne, Victoria), and the region of her birthplace on Bundjalung Country (North Coast of NSW).
Contact
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