Night Shift       (2004)

Night Shift       (2004)

Event, performance and a double-sided poster/map 42cm x 62cm given out free at the Frieze Art Fair in 2004.

(Another version of Night Shift is in the British Council Collection: the original pen and ink drawing and the photographs of the seven animals).

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Adam Chodzko was commissioned by Frieze to make a work for the Frieze Art Fair, London, October, 2004.  In response, Chodzko chose to create a poster proposing an alternative mapping of the Frieze art fair site, to be distributed free to the thousands of visitors to the Fair in London, October, 2004 as an alternative way of navigating their way through the hundreds of different galleries and events situated there.  Although an “official map”, also published by Frieze, was available it assumed that the Fair’s visitors would navigate the multitude of spaces through their existing knowledge of favourite galleries.  Night Shift instead offered another form of logic for moving through the Fair, tracking the route of creatures.
The skunk, Burmese python and a wolf visited the fair, individually, on the nights prior to the Fair’s opening so that their three separate paths could then be drawn on the map ready for it to be printed before the Fair began.
The red deer stag then visited on the opening night, with an agouti rat, cane toad and scorpion passing through the fair on the remaining consecutive nights that the fair was open.  Each animal chose its own path through the fair arriving for its visit between 11pm and 3am in the morning.

‘There’s another map of the Frieze Art Fair, one made by a select group of nocturnal visitors who access the tent when everyone else has left it for the night. Collectively building a sporadic carnival parade through its labyrinths; a wolf, a snake, a stag, a scorpion, a toad, a skunk and a rat…(London Zoo is very close). Their plotted paths are advice for the fair’s daylight visitors and to occupy their dreams at night.’

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.pdf of Night Shift guide, front
.pdf of Night Shift guide, reverse