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Adam Chodzko is a visual artist exploring collective imagination – its visions, knowledge, desires, ambiguities, and contradictions – shaping our connections with each another and the worlds we inhabit. His multimedia works often take the form of searches; trying to see collectively, in relation with others. But also trying to glimpse with others what we’re keen to look away from. Investigating the spectrum between what we think we are and what we could become, his heterogeneous body of work ranges from video, performance, drawing, and sculpture to socially-engaged processes, often questioning what art might be. His work is exhibited across diverse places and audiences, from traditional museums and galleries to ordinary – or even obscure – urban or rural spaces, often questioning where art might be. Wherever it encounters its audience Chodzko’s art practice aims to catalyse new collective imaginaries, co-creating communities of seeing. His work investigates how our play with the visual might deepen our perception of the world, reshape our connections with others, and enable a more equal sharing of power.
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Through questioning the act of seeing, Chodzko explores how art can reveal concealed realities, hauntings, and strange emotions lying dormant within everyday life. Engaging reflexively with the viewer his artworks create a space between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, remoteness and intimacy, and public and private space. The work appears to make itself through the audience’s act of looking. His multifaceted art works are intended as an ‘image filter’ or ‘image moderator,’ offering the viewer possibilities for both vision or blindness. Often adopting processes of storytelling his practice weaves autobiographical memory and everyday experience into science fictions, following a speculative path in the present towards its alternative realities, its hyperstitions.
Working directly with the networks of people and places that surround him Chodzko focuses on the relational politics of culture’s edges, endings, losses, displacements, transitions and disappearances. Using a process of ‘looking awry’ as a provocative working with the ‘wrong’ place, or time, or question, his creative method involves ‘getting hold of the wrong end of the stick to use it as a compass needle.‘
His artworks often involve ‘outsourcing’ perception to others, so that they become ‘seers’ and ‘image moderators’ for the viewer. Through these different layers, or angles, of perception Chodzko’s work is trying to discover imaginative spaces lurking beyond a field of knowledge’s usual constituencies and experts. This expanded form of making seeks to catalyse new productive mistranslations of our everyday environments.
Gathered into a single body of work – imagined as a living body, and a garden; a dynamic and diverse interactive system of relations, synergistically evolving and maintaining this living, mutating entity – Chodzko’s creative practice weaves together diverse fields of embodied and disembodied knowledge. Explorations within this sympoiesis include the intersections between autobiography, communication, consciousness, attention, perception, disavowal, embodiment, belief, magick, ritual, ethnography, digital technology, ecology, climate change, migration, place, landscape, identity, history, community, etc. Acknowledging art’s precarity, whilst questioning art’s frequent insularity, Chodzko wonders whether art might require not only a new audience and new forms of artist, but also a new empowered status for the art object?
Ephemeral communities become generated through these processes of ‘making together’; assemblies of owners of a particular jacket and a reunion of the children ‘murdered’ in a Pasolini film; a god look-alike contest; lighting technicians asked to advise on the light in heaven; a London gallery’s archive given to a group of Kurdish asylum seekers to edit and hide outside the capital; the multi-faceted Design for a Carnival, the evolution of a communal ritual event for the future, including Settlement, the legal purchase of a square foot of land as a gift to a stranger, Nightshift, a late night parade of nocturnal animals to the Frieze Art Fair, London, and M-path, the collection and distribution of perception-changing footwear for gallery visitors. A trilogy of science fiction video and mixed media works, Hole, Around and Pyramid, evolve a narrative where art – through a state of ‘future ruin’– becomes a vehicle for a community’s collective mythology to break ‘bad patterns’ or deviate from a ‘bad path’. Echo, The Pickers and Ghost elaborate these themes, excavating processes of memory, the imaginary, empathy, notions of trust, and active and passive states. Because…, 2013 (at Tate Britain) and We are Ready for your Arrival, 2013 (at Raven Row) and A Room for Laarni, Image Moderator, 2013 (at Marlborough Contemporary) further develop these ideas through material manifestations of the unconscious relationships between individuals and groups; their excesses, dreams, beliefs, connections and disappearances. This latter work explores the relationship and flow of images between a western European social-networking site (for teenagers) and an image moderator, based in the Philippines, whose job it is to monitor this flood of digital photographs, in order to flag up those whose contents might be deemed ‘bad’.
Deep Above (2015) and Rising (2013) continue to expose this process of making sense of imagery in relation to our collective and individual responses to the threat of climate change. These works speculate that, inadvertently, a repurposing of ‘art thinking’ might be the only way of short-circuiting our brains’ evolutionary hard wiring to bypass the psychological paralysis we experience, instead of taking the necessary action to avert the climate emergency. Sleepers (2016) explores our empathic projections in relation to the spectacle of the unconsciousness of others. Channel, Rupture, 2015 and Design for a Fold, 2015, both continue Chodzko’s speculations about the affects of flows of empathy across time and space and between the local and the remote. Many of Chodzko’s works evolve through this sense of projecting outwards from the self into the perception of, not only other people, but also the apparently inanimate, through migratory embodiments with objects, rooms, places, institutions, images (e.g., the permanent public sculptures a way from heaven and Holding the Earth this Way ).
Recent works explore the ecological relationships between place (particularly the idea of the garden), perception, identity, mythology, ritual, language, the body and the unconscious (eg; A Hostile Environment (2019), Fluid Dynamics; The Quail is Rising (2020), O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix [live] (2020), Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see (2020), The Return of the Fleet Spring Heads (2021)), The Valley Unfurls its Song (2021), and the The Green, the Flow, the Path of the Game (2021).
More recently Chodzko has explored aspects of his body of work through writing. Examining our capacities for attention, shame, awkwardness, care and perception, his book Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs...is staged within his long relationship with Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Current major projects include a free public digital tool that transforms descriptions of a community’s nocturnal dreams into visual animations for them. The Dreamshare Seer, the dreaming ecology of an island (initially the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, close to where Chodzko lives), is visually co-created between its inhabitants and AI, and guided by indigenous Malaysian dream knowledge.
…Or, maybe a much better way to approach Chodzko’s practice – to get a sense of how it all feels – is to try his 2.5 mins trailer for an artist’s talk ?
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Born in 1965. Lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK.
Since 1991 Chodzko has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Tate Britain; Tate, St Ives; Raven Row, London; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); The Benaki Museum, Athens; Athens Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Venice Biennale; Royal Academy, London; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, NY; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Kunstmuseum Luzern etc. Recent projects include commissions by Creative Time, New York, The Contemporary Art Society, Wellcome Trust, Frieze Art Fair, and Hayward Gallery.
Chodzko has been included in many British Council curated international exhibitions of British Art, from General Release (1995) at the Venice Biennale, to Micro/Macro: British Art 1996-2002 (2003), Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Breaking Step (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and Private Utopia (2014), Japan.
In 2002 he received awards from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, and in 2007 was awarded an AHRC Practice -Led Research Fellowship in the Film Department at the University of Kent, Canterbury. In 2015 Chodzko was shortlisted for the Jarman Awards. In 2016 he received a DACS Art360 Award. In 2023, he was awarded a British Council Connections Through Culture Grant to create a project focused on collective dreaming in Malaysia, an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant for a project evolving from a community’s collective dream descriptions, translating them via Artificial Intelligence into animations, and a funded Practice-Led PhD from the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University to extend the research for this project.
Chodzko’s work is in the collections of the Tate, The British Council, The British Film Institute, The Arts Council, APT, Auckland City Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Society Collection, The Creative Foundation, The Bergé Collection – Madrid, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum – Bilbao, Manchester Art Gallery, Frac Occitanie Montpellier, GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin, Grizedale Arts, MAMBo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Plains Arts Museum, North Dakota, USA, Saatchi Collection, South London Gallery, Towner Gallery Eastbourne, Wellcome Collection and international private collections.
He has lectured and taught on BA and MA’s at numerous Higher and Further Education institutions internationally including, in the UK; Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, Slade School of Fine Art, Goldsmiths University of London, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, Sheffield Hallam University, Open School East, Dartington School of Arts, and Ruskin College, Oxford. In the US: Carnegie Mellon University, Rutgers University. In Canada: Banff Centre. Chodzko was on the Faculty of Fine Arts for the British School at Rome (2018-2022). He was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Kent (2014-2018). He has been the external examiner for the Slade’s BA Fine Art programme (2016-2020), and the MA Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2018-2021).
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– Adam Chodzko’s selected moving image work is archived on Vimeo.
– “Strange looks, ghost codes, & the co-created dreamlife of a community” : INSIDE/OUT lecture at Leeds Beckett University, April 2024.
– “Strange looks, ghost codes, & the co-created dreamlife of a community” ; 3 mins trailer for an artist’s talk by Adam Chodzko.
– Adam Chodzko’s archive of selected moving image works for exhibition, with LUX.
– Image licensing for selected works through DACS
– Information about Adam Chodzko’s archive of artworks, via Art360 Foundation.
– Adam Chodzko is a member of FRANK Fair Artist Pay
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