Adrian Kiss

I create large-scale, time-based installations working with natural materials, found objects and textiles, things that carry memory. At the center of my practice is Object's Duration, the conceptual and material territory where materials assert their own logic, accumulate time and perform beyond human authority. Rather than treating materials as passive matter, I understand them as part of relationships that exceed human intention and control, attending to the ways in which objects and materials resist, transform and perform under and beyond human influence.

My practice draws from the intersections where the rural meets the urban, because that is where I am from. Born in Romania and raised in Hungary, and later in England, I grew up within diverse systems of social, economic and ecological manipulation and extraction, and these experiences have shaped how I understand material as deeply embedded in power dynamics and exploitation. My childhood in Coșnea, a small village in the Romanian Carpathians largely untouched by urbanization, where I spent much of my time at my grandparents' home, offered me a contrasting perspective, a system of values ​​​​rooted in care and reciprocity, where folk traditions were still actively lived and performed through material culture, and where tending to the land was akin to the land caring for us. At the same time, I became aware of how care and brutality can be entangled in rural life, often becoming difficult to distinguish from one another. These contradictions remain central to how I think about and work with materials. I live and work in the memory and nostalgia of my time across many places, yet I am constantly challenged by my surroundings to question my learnings. Making, as a way to digest experience, has become a process of unlearning, a way to remember rural knowledge and ways of being that I, and perhaps others, may have been made to forget.