Adriane Morard is a transdisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, gilding, drawing, installation and video. Working with historically charged materials and techniques, she investigates the symbolic economies through which value, authority and belief are produced, transmitted and contested.

Gold runs through the work as both material and argument. Using a sixteenth-century water-based leafing technique traditionally reserved for icons, she takes up the most prestigious of materials and cracks, distorts and diverts it from its function as a marker of power, so that it may carry a different symbolic economy.

This logic extends to other loaded materials. In the ongoing 476 Promises, marble and its imitations are tracked across Europe as discursive matter, where the precarity of representation exposes the workings of power and the promises on which it rests. In Haut les mains!, a gilded panel of ten instructions is unfolded through a lexical field of colour, material, sound and image. In Familiar Spirits, charms and talismans worked in gold leaf and lacquer are dedicated to invoking or revoking the presence of familiar spirits.

Across these registers, Morard remains attentive to what dominant narratives leave out. Drawing on queer and de-romanising perspectives, and on the figure of the wxtch as much as on the archaism of her medium, she creates liminal spaces where other forms of knowledge, value and relation can emerge.

Her work has been shown internationally since 2013 in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and beyond. Originally from Switzerland and based in Berlin for several years, she now lives and works in Brussels.