Adam Sébire is an artist-filmmaker whose artworks explore climate change and the Anthropocene.His artistic practise approaches its vast spatiotemporal dimensions through lens-based art, especially multi-screen video.

He's also one of the Arctic Circle’s 4 million human inhabitants: having just opened his solo exhibition at Svalbard’s art gallery in March 2020, Australia’s borders closed against the pandemic for 18 months, marooning him first in a lighthouse for 3 months; then above Norway’s Arctic Circle, where he now lives and works.Adam studied documentary filmmaking at the national film schools of Australia & Cuba, going on to direct documentaries for Australian public broadcasters ABC & SBS. His experiences filming on Tuvalu in 2003, only 2m above the rising waters of the Pacific, turned his work towards climate change. He completed a MFA and began a PhD to explore how the imperceptible elements of the climate emergency present particular representational challenges in lens-based art.Adam’s own video art deploys beauty and mystery as the sharpest tools in the box, enlisting slow-, reverse- and fast-motion or borrowing climate scientists’ thermographic imagers. With the aid of a drone pilot’s license he adapts techniques from late Mediæval artists such as Hieronymus Bosch's elevated vantage point, to detach viewers from everyday perspectives; to suggest an overview on the state of our environment; to beckon a choice. He further applies their techniques of multi-panelled paintings (polyptychs) across multi-channel videos.

Adam's artistic research & practice centres on a multi-screen form he calls the video polyptych with which he explores the vast spatiotemporal dimensions of the climate crisis – and the cognitive dissonances underlying our responses to it.  Building on his documentary background, he began a PhD at the UNSW Faculty of Art & Design, exploring aesthetic visual representations of anthropogenic global warming. His PhD work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the Deutsches Museum, Max Planck Institute, the South Australian Museum and Perth Festival (WA).He co-founded the Vertical Film Festival, the world's first competition for 9:16 films, in Australia. From 2019-20 he lectured on vertical visual forms — past, present & future — for Facebook Creative Shop in New York, Singapore, Auckland & Sydney.

Solo exhibitions include AnthropoScenes at Galleri Svalbard (2020); In the Heat of the Moment (Accelerator Gallery Sydney, Roads to Nowhere (Head On Photo Festival/Vivid Sydney/Rocks Pop-Up). Group exhibitions include Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2020 Waterhouse Prize finalist), Tideline at the Northern Norway Art Exhibition (2021 Critics Prizewinner), Hellishei∂i in The Art of Energy (2021, 1st prize), works in the Wuhan & Chengdu Biennales (2022-23), as well as several major works in Polarity, Fremantle Arts Centre, 2024.

Adam has directed over 25 television documentaries; the United Nations in New York premièred his film Echoes Across the Divide, later sold to broadcasters globally. Single-channel artworks include Le Violoncelle (2003), METROpolis, Camel Roundabout (2012) and Breakdown (2018). In 2016 Adam was Artist in Residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, in 2018 at Upernavik Museum Greenland, at SÍM Reykjavík (Iceland) 2018-19, in 2019-20 at Galleri Svalbard (Longyearbyen), and at Uummannaq Polar Institute with Nordic-Baltic Mobility Program for Culture funding in 2024.

AnthropoScenes (video art series) ➔