ADELINE

Adeline is a performance artist whose work explores pain, control, devotion and the physical limits of trust. Her performances often involve blood, restraint, endurance and acts of violence carried out on a willing partner, using the body as both material and instrument. Rather than treating pain as inherently destructive, Adeline is interested in what happens when it is deliberately given, received, repeated and transformed into something shared between performer and subject.

Adeline came to performance without the same lifelong sense of artistic calling that drives many of her contemporaries. Reserved and self-assured, she has always been selective about where she places her attention and unusually committed once she does. Her fascination with blood, ritual, control and the limits of the body gradually developed into a performance practice that gave those interests a structure and a purpose.

Her most recent work was a series of increasingly demanding live performances created with songwriter and performer Sam Zalta, examining the line between care and cruelty, performer and subject and the point at which devotion becomes indistinguishable from endurance. Adeline has not been seen publicly since early 2025.