White Magic       (2023)

White Magic       (2023)

Performance, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (May 6th – May 30th).

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Made over the duration of Chodzko’s solo exhibition at Wei-Ling Contemporary, (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) White Magic creates a ritual, using a dream logic; a carnival procession of colour dissemination through a pragmatic and economic system of gift exchange, displacement and transformation.

The artist bought all the red clothes he could find in a charity shop in Kuala Lumpur, (removing all redness from that store) and brought them to the gallery to hang there, draped like drying laundry.  Midway through the exhibition he donated all these red clothes to a different charity shop in KL and bought up all their green clothing (removing all greenness from that store) which he then install in the exhibition, in the same positions as the previous red clothing, for his exhibition’s final week. At the end of the exhibition Chodzko donated all that green clothing back to the original charity shop where he had sourced the red clothing a few weeks beforehand.
The event of this artwork is partly set beyond what can be seen as material evidence in the gallery, or documented on a website and is set in the future with the gradual subsequent dispersal of the red clothes in one area of KL and the green clothes in another area of KL, with the new owners unaware of the clothing’s  previous fleeting participation as ‘artwork’. Chodzko imagines White Magic as a form of chromatic growth, like the spread of a coloured dye dropped in water. The event of ‘White Magic’ is also set in the past with the collective rejection of this clothing by their original owners, their aura still haunting these garments in the present, a faint trace of abjection lingering in spite of being carefully laundered.  And we can wonder, after the exhibition, does this atomised costume still retain the aura of the art object, following a 30° wash cycle?
Beyond ideas of exchange, gifting and transformation Chodzko is also interested in the idea of a ‘collective costume’, an inadvertent carnival, masquerade and ritual. The work was conceived as a proposition for an exchange that could become commonplace as a way of honouring a state of being situated in two places, and within two communities.
Revealed only in the documentation images are two brief glimpses of somebody – probably the artist – wearing all the red clothes simultaneously prior to their installation, then halfway through the exhibition, all the green clothes; a private, sneaked moment of monstrous assembly and consumption before their diffusion back into public space.

Credits:
The staff at Kedai Bless, F33A, 1st Floor, Citta Mall, Jalan PJU 1A/46, 47301, Petaling Jaya, Selangor.  (8/5/2023 and 30/5/2023)
and Kedai Bless, CP-K-6 Ground Floor, SMCC JLN PJU 1/3G, 47301, Petaling Jaya, Selangor. (23/5/2023)
Mikhail Vanan and Carolyn Wee.

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An earlier version of White Magic was made in (2005).

White Magic (2023) was originally made for the solo exhibition “But as we looked it suddenly began to change” which 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).