Monika K. Adler

Director and Screenwriter

London, England

Member Since:
November 2017

Last online:
> 2 weeks ago

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About Monika

Monika K. Adler is an acclaimed photographer and avant-garde filmmaker, known for her challenging and provocative photography and experimental films. Her works have shown in hundreds of film festivals, art museums and galleries worldwide.

“Historical violence haunts the short films of Monika K. Adler. The bodies of her female protagonists are carriers of traumatic memory. Even apparently consensual encounters carry this residue of past horrors. The contagion of mass violence, invading waves of fanatics inspired by the pure rage of true belief to shattering acts of violation and subjugation inform every frame of Adler’s films. Yet her short films are intimate and minimal, the majority of them limited to two figures, one male, one female; domestic melodramas of desire, estrangement, sorrow and rage. The males however continue to carry with them the threat or at least the echo of the past’s marauding ravagers or act as inheritors and enforcers of oppressive and brutal orthodoxies: The women appear perpetually trapped in scenarios of betrayal, disappointment, subjugation and reduction, frequently if unknowingly complicit in their own bad outcomes.”

: Robert Smart, The Ambivalent Body: On The Short Films Of Monika K. Adler, London, 2013.

“Cutting across boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness, or of time, race or culture, Monika K. Adler’s work exhibits and offers engagement: embracing anxieties, neurosis or delusions, which themselves can be full of all hidden secrets and/or memories (as in trauma related experiences and memories) of actual history (e.g. in terms of bodily and emotional abuse) in terms of our current state of being, ‘the now’. So eventually, with the power of the strength gained from coming through distress and suffering, liberation of the self as individual can be possible.”

: Drs Kevin Zdaniecki, Review Of Monika K. Adler’s Photographic Work: A Psychological Perspective, London, 2013.

Gender:
Female

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Credits

Sick Bacchus (2023 - 2025)
Film by Director (Drama and Horror) Writer/Director SICK BACCHUS: www.sickbacchus.com
Simone de Beauvoir told me (2016)
Video by Monika K. Adler Director Simone de Beauvoir told us that for woman there is no other way out than to work for her liberation. In her video-art work “Simone de Beauvoir told me…” artist and filmmaker Monika K. Adler employs the art historical tradition of the ‘portrait-miniature’ to communicate and recontextualise de Beauvoir’s iconic words through a cyclical mirror performance with an unexpected conclusion.
On Being an Angel (2014)
Film (Drama, Mystery, Thriller, Biography and 1 More) Director A metaphorical meditation on the suicide of the American artist Francesca Woodman.
Involuntary Memory (2014)
Film (Short) Director The descendant of a Gulag internee undergoes repressed trauma borne from a history of genocide across generations. He attempts to exorcise the still present collective memory through a disturbing re-enactment.
The Beauty of the Shadow (2013)
Film (Drama, Mystery, Thriller and Short) Director Scandalous love affair between catholic priest, young man and his girlfriend Monika.Studium of the darkest desires and instincts.
Mutability (2013)
Film (Drama, Mystery, Thriller and Short) Director Psychiatrist Dr Karl Adler is troubled by the memory of an illegally performed autopsy he carried out on a former patient 'Monika' - a young woman who suffered from a complex delusional disorder which manifested itself in the falsification and acting out in real life of numerous elaborate online identities and histories. Her death evokes in him an existential crisis. He meditates on the bounds that separate life and death, and concocts a maladjusted theory which negates spirituality and glorifies corporeal biology. In this, his own delusion, he considers the subject of his dysfunctional case-study 'dead but still alive' and decides to give her something which she can take with her to the afterlife... Written by Anonymous
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (2013)
Film (Documentary, Biography and Short) Director British contemporary artist Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz recounts a narrative about the northern renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch which reflects upon authenticity in art in context with his 2012 series of large-scale paintings which reconfigured the Dutch master's iconic works such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490) and The Haywain Triptych (c.1516) into a 'post-historic, trans-cultural manuscripts'. Written by Anonymous
Come Back to the Trees (2013)
Film (Adventure, Crime, Drama and Short) Director She-wolf, a post-matriarchal trickster figure, and twelve young women,her female shamans, are waiting for the messenger with their holy communion, which comes from the body of a murdered man.
Misery of My Soul (2013)
Video by Monika K. Adler Director MONIKA K. ADLER “Misery of my soul, 2013, 2’58 In memory of Oksana Makar. Performance (SASHA) Premiere: BODIES OF SILENCE #3 WHEN WORDS ARE MADE FLESH curated by Cuntemporary for One Billion Rising.
Chernobyl of Love (2012)
Film (Drama, Horror, Mystery, Thriller and 1 More) Director In a hotel in Kiev a young women after murdering a man, is consuming his brain. Her act of cannibalism evokes traumatic memories which take us to the Red Forest near the abandoned town of Chernobyl in the Ukraine. It relates through harsh, visceral yet at once luxuriant imagery a depiction of humanity's deepest, darkest, and basest of instincts framed within the context of love story. It is a study of the psychopathology of young women whose traumatic past leads her to commit a crime. As with the horrific aftermath and social impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster the film is an account, and meditation upon emotional barbarism and the destruction of human relationships Written by Anonymous.