Adam Sébire is an artist-filmmaker whose films & artworks explore climate change & the Anthropocene. His artistic practise approaches its oft-imperceptible 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 in a fjord above Norway’s Arctic Circle, where he now lives & works.

Adam studied documentary filmmaking at the national film schools of Australia & Cuba, going on to film more than 2 dozen 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 mystery & beauty 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 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 locations around the globe; he was also wrote & delivered a semester’s lectures in Expanded Documentary film production at University of Sydney in 2017.

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 three large-scale works in Polarity, Fremantle Arts Centre for the opening of the 2024 Perth Festival. Adam’s Iceberg Care was projected as the centrepiece of UNESCO’s first ever World Day for Glaciers.

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. His sea ice film Sikoqqinngisaannassooq, made with a Greenlandic Inuit community in 2024, toured European film festivals 2025-26, and the award-winning 5 minute version is used in multiple educational programs across Europe. Adam’s been Artist-in-Residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Upernavik Museum (Greenland), Artsource (Western Australia), SÍM Reykjavík, Galleri Svalbard (Longyearbyen), Kunstnarhuset Messen (Norway) 2024-25, and at Uummannaq Polar Institute with Nordic Culture Contact funding in 2024 and 2026.

Adam Sébire: anthropoScenes (video art series) ➔