Suddenly we all began…. (2010)

Suddenly we all began…. (2010)

15 circus posters from 1980’s to 2000 and wallpaper paste.
Dimensions variable

[Installed on the exterior of the windows of Siakos Hanappe, Athens during Adam Chodzko. Taken in, fall out.  September to November, 2010]

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Suddenly we all began…. is a series of circus posters, each different but incorporating the illustration of a laughing clown (sometimes clearly derived from the same source image), advertising circus performances taking place around the world (eg: from Piscina, Torino to Grant County, New Mexico to Swansea, Wales etc) from 1980’s –2000, .  These flyers were collected by Adam Chodzko who then pasted them to the interior of the gallery window, in reverse chronological order, as though going back in time, with the oldest pasted last, on top. Usually these posters appear on hoardings, lamp posts and empty shopfronts to signal the temporary arrival of a circus, usually on the periphery of a city, in its wastelands or parks.  The ‘circus coming to town’ undermines the banality of a community’s quiet everyday life, puncturing it with the chaotic, absurd, irrational, exotic, perverse, dangerous and magical.  Nomadic circus performers were perceived by the townspeople with awe, desire and suspicion. “Running off to join the circus” meant a break from the oppressive shackles of conformity into a form of freedom.
In Suddenly we all began…. (2010) the repeated motif of the laughing clown, already an excessive image of carnivalesque fun (whilst also being a generic character with the horror genre), appears even more manic through its numerous temporal and geographic iterations.
Here, Greece’s escalating economic crisis, appears to have provoked an ‘excess’ of circuses, emerging from across time and space, on a functioning gallery front, reducing its interior’s natural light and obliterating its view, suggesting that it is already ceased trading. This work is, perhaps, an act of self-sabotage for the exhibiting artist? Or does this apparent ‘problem’ and change become the perfect position from which to explore the exhibition inside (see also: Corner  (2007))?

A later version of  Suddenly we all began…  was made in 2013.  Both versions reconnect with Chodzko’s body of work, Design for a Carnival, which evolved around 2003 (eg: Design for a Carnival and Ants Choose Position for Sequins – 2 Seconds Interval ). Their consideration of a collective carnivalesque social space of otherness, performance and transformation also continues in works nearly two decades later eg: Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see  (2020).
Variations of the clown’s masked face appears in the Mask-Filter series, (and eg: I See Through Every Image. (A souvenir for Laarni; A planting template for Belladonna seeds), 2013 ), while the clown’s unruly costume (and its influence on their erratic movements of the body) manifests in works such as  M-path  (2006).