“…but as we looked it suddenly began to change”        (2023)    [exhibition at Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia]

“…but as we looked it suddenly began to change”        (2023)    [exhibition at Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia]

Solo exhibition by Adam Chodzko, 12 – 27 May 2023, Wei-Ling Contemporary, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The exhibition includes the works:

jengkuan (2023)
White Magic  (2023)
outside, to clear my head  (2023)
Falling. Into the city. Structures of Night.   (2023)
Sleepers  (2016)
The Valley Unfurls its Song  (2021)
Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire  (1999 – ongoing)
Sing the Song of the Trepizate  (2020)

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‘but as we looked it suddenly began to change’  is a solo exhibition by Adam Chodzko featuring selected recent and new works made specifically in relation to his research into Malaysian culture focusing on the subject of dreaming.  The show includes videos,  drawings, and process-based sculpture.

Taking as its focus the structures of dreams, their visuality and fluid ambiguities of time and place, and their coexistence of multiple states, Chodzko’s exhibition is an experiment to embody the nocturnal consciousness we all activate during sleep. According to contemporary neuroscience, dreaming functions as a kind of “backwards Google search… using a bizarre algorithm…”*, an odd archiving process that is by nature diverse, inclusive, and experimental.

Chodzko’s interest in exploring this subject in Malaysia emerged from his initial research via the work of 20th C Western anthropologists, into the cultural practices of the Senoi people, one of Malaysia’s indigenous Orang Asli communities, who are renowned for their exceptional relationship with the dream state.  Although partly distorted, idealised and exoticised by the colonial gaze in this Western research, communication to the sleeper from other realities through dreaming continues to hold a huge significance for many Orang Asli communities. Through his project, supported by The British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme, Chodzko aims to address the under-explored subject of dreaming in the Western world, (and the apparent shame about the subject in the UK!),and to bridge this cultural gap by offering a collaborative and immersive visual experience that utilises the networking and therapeutic potential of dreaming. By promoting collaboration, the project not only provides a singular visual encounter but also creates a platform for emotional healing and personal growth through the exploration of the dream state.

Paralleling the exhibition ‘but as we looked it suddenly began to change’, Chodzko is conducting a series of discussions and interviews with a diverse group of Malaysian artists, makers, thinkers, anthropologists and members of the Orang Asli community to create guidance for his new major project in the UK, Growing Our Dream Ecologies. This project will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to visually animate a British community’s (on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent) dream descriptions.

As part of the exhibition Chodzko shared a performance talk: “I’ve tried weaving it. Could I now use it as a sail?”  (Trailer), and ran a workshop using different techniques of dreamwork.

* Matthew Walker: [English scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley]. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (New York, 2017), p 132. Writing about the recent neuroscience of dreams:
“…during REM sleep… your brain tests out and builds connections between vast stores of information… using a bizarre algorithm that is biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious associations, rather like a backward Google search. In ways your waking brain would never attempt, the sleeping brain fuses together disparate sets of knowledge to foster impressive problem-solving abilities… informational alchemy “

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Adam Chodzko’s solo exhibition “But as we looked it suddenly began to change”  took place at Wei-Ling Contemporary gallery in Kuala Lumpur, May 2023.  In collaboration with gallery director, Wei-Ling Lim, the exhibition and its wider research project was supported by an award by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture. (Connections Through Culture is British Council’s arts collaboration and mobility grant, a programme to seed cultural exchanges between the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia).

Thanks to Lim Wei-Ling, Lim Siew Boon, Mikhail Vanan, Noel Tan & P-Y  at Wei-Ling Gallery.
And to Erica Choong and Florence Lambert from the British Council.