About
Born in Bedford, UK (1982) Adam Knight received an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2007. He is an artist based in London who works across image, sound and installation. He is drawn to relationships between the built environment and archival practices. Using research and art practice he explores latent aspects of architecture to reveal new insights and perspectives. Works derive from research methodologies incorporating field recordings, writing and institutional structures. Scopic and haptic methods are used to mediate and interface with objects of inquiry. Research ‘desire-lines’ help connect disparate aspects of a project. He is interested in the specificity of form and material to reflexively draw attention to concepts and methods embedded in the work.
Knight has exhibited his work across the UK and internationally, participated in projects and residencies at Brunswick Centre in London, La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, The Watch in Berlin, The Showroom in London, A-Z West in California, Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Eastside International in Los Angeles, Atelierhaus Salzamt in Linz, Edinburgh Sculpture, League Residency in New York, Kunstlerhaus Aussersihil in Zürich, ACC Galerie in Weimar and Cell Project Space in London. In 2023, he was Practitioner in Residence at the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Studies.
He has been awarded grants from University of London, Künstlerhaus Ahrenshoop, Arts Council England, Knowledge Exchange Fund UAL, a-n, Creative Scotland, Royal College of Art and University for the Creative Arts. He is a Senior Tutor and member of the Sites and Situations research group at the Royal College of Art in London. He is currently an external examiner at Goldsmiths College and London College of Communication.
Recent / News
Bank of England Museum x London Design Festival
17.-20. September
If much of the design that is exhibited during the festival is flashy and Instagram-friendly, then A Kind of Exchange, a group exhibition staged by the Royal College of Art in conjunction with the Bank of England Museum, served as a welcome reminder that richer, more knotty interpretations of design do not always lend themselves easily to capture by camera phones. Prompted by the bank’s role as a driver of financial exchange (with the institution having made its waste banknotes – both shredded polymer and paper – available to exhibiting artists as materials), the exhibition is a display of work that examines the wider questions of value and connection that this raises. The results, unsurprisingly, proved fascinatingly complex. Adam Knight’s (RE)MONIAC, for instance, offers a critical study of inequality, neoliberalism and trickle-down economics, recreating the 1949 MONIAC computer, an analogue device that modelled economies using the flow of water, but now equipped with a foam cast of Margaret Thatcher’s hands that seem to tightly grip its fiscal flow. Elsewhere, architect Sam Jacob imposed a recreation of Sol LeWitt’s Forms Derived from a Cube atop a mortgage document, entangling architectural production with the financial systems that enable it, while Studiomama has created stability sculptures that are weighted with panels of shredded banknotes, their financial value recast in tremulous, precarious physical form. Staged in the museum’s space in Bank, A Kind of Exchange fell outside of the festival’s traditional beaten path, and its works proved too multilayered to admit of easy visual summary in slick photographs for social media. Nevertheless, in a week dedicated to public consumption of design, it is helpful to recall that the field need not always be digestible and readily accessible – sometimes, design can also tackle topics that are complex, loaded with sociopolitical value, and which do not admit of easy summary.
Words Oli Stratford and Helen Gonzalez Brown