Tal Adler is an artist and researcher whose work revolves around the construction, representation, and contestation of narratives. His long-term projects engage with collections, archives, museums, and other contexts through which he investigates the politics of history and memory, heritage, provenance, photography, science, and display.
Adler’s projects develop through sustained research and enduring engagements with individuals, communities, and institutions. Through collaboration and participation, his work explores multiple perspectives and ways of knowing and narrating. Working conceptually, Adler’s projects are not bound to a specific medium but develop their methods, strategies, and forms as the process of inquiry unfolds. Photography, film, writing, performance, installation, and public programming are employed alongside research, dialogue, mediation, and curatorial work.
Often extending over several years, this work is developed within artistic, academic, and cultural institutions through infrastructures of research funding. This long-term, institutionally embedded approach aims to move beyond commentary or temporary intervention towards significant and sustainable change in how difficult narratives are addressed, researched, and represented. Through these extended processes, Adler develops concepts, methods, platforms, and collaborative structures that reshape relationships and practices and continue beyond the projects from which they emerge – taken up, adapted, and further developed by others.
Since 2011, Adler has held artistic-research positions at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he most recently coordinated artistic research at inherit. heritage in transformation. His projects have involved collaborations across the museum and heritage field, including with the Natural History Museum Vienna, Weltmuseum Wien, Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim, Mauthausen Memorial, and Humboldt Lab at the Humboldt Forum, as well as numerous local and regional partners. His artistic research has received substantial competitive funding through programmes including FWF-PEEK, the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Alongside his artistic practice, he has taught photography, art, and artistic research and has exhibited, published, and presented his work internationally.