film-maker
curator
writer
&c.
(not the author of Salt, Gradisil etc)
Since 1991 Adam Roberts made films and videos; some requiring crews of dozens to shoot on 35mm, while others were shot and edited alone, working on Super-8 or an iPhone.
His collaborators have included film-maker Jack Hazan, choreographer Jonathan Burrows, composers Kevin Volans & Matteo Fargion, and the dancer Sylvie Guillem.
His film Mickey Finn won the Grand Prix du Jury at Angers international Film Festival in 1992. The jury included Chantal Akerman.
His film Outside won bronze at Ebensee Film Festival.
His work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Haus der Kunst Munich, Maxi Gallery Rome, BFI Southbank, on SBS Australia, France 2, BBC TV & Channel 4 Television.
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In 2011, with Joanna Hogg, he founded
A Nos Amours, which has programmed screenings, curated exhibitions, and staged conferences.
See here for more information.
Between 2013 and 2015 A Nos Amours curated, with Chantal Akerman's help and participation, an influential complete retrospective of Akerman's films and video at London's ICA, with breakout events across the UK. This retrospective is credited by Laura Mulvey with establishing the current profile of Chatal Akerman's work, not least that her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was chosed as Sight & Sounds greatest film of all time in 2022.
An ambitious Arts Council of England and Marion Goodwin Gallery supported exhibition of much of Akerman installation work followed at Ambika P3 in London in 2015. Widely reviewed, and selected by Guardian Critic Adrian Searle as one of the best exhiitions of the year.
A Nos Amours published the
Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook
in 2019, witha foreward by Laura Mulvey, as a key resource of writing and information. The book has run to several editions, and is still in print.
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Between 2015 and 2017 Adam, in collaboration with Paul Coleman, produced and filmed an unprecedented series of interviews with long-term survivors of HIV:
AIDS Since the 80s Project
In 2019 the collection was taken into the London Archive, where it has been indexed and catalogued with support from the Wellcome Foundation.
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Adam's Lamentation. In the Stuart Croft Archive
was published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2020. The book is part memoir, part essay, developing themes of loss and survival, retrospection and the archive, and ellipsis at a time of mass-extinction.
I float among the movies I have seen or half remember. They are inchoate and lovely. I bask in the warm seas of the past, amid the myriad forms of other lives around me.
(from Lamentation. In the Stuart Croft Archive, p57)
A novel, greate ffyshe, will be published in 2026.
For a list of other writing, including chapters, journal articles, etc, see here.
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Between 2006 and 2016 he taught documentary film making at London Academy of Film & TV. He has lectured at Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, Westminster and LCC. Since 1988 Adam has provided editorial and compliance advice to Channel 4 and Film4, supporting the acquisition and programming of feature films.