Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions of human behaviour. Using a wide variety of media - from video to performance to fly-posters to drawing - his work explores a collective wondering: how can we engage with the existence of others? How else might we relate? And what reality emerges from the search for this knowledge?
Chodzko's art proposes new relationships between our value and belief systems, between the community and private spaces that generate these systems, and between the documents and fictions that describe and guide them. Working directly with the people and places that surround him, often using forms of anthropology, Chodzko focuses on the relational politics of culture's edges, endings, displacements and disappearances in an active looking in the 'wrong' place – A search for knowledge. His art practice operates in the tight, poetic spaces he evolves between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism often engaging reflexively and directly with the role of the viewer.
Intimate collections and ephemeral communities are frequently generating through his works: 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 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 2004 and 'M-path,' the collection and distribution of perception-changing footwear for gallery visitors. More recently a trilogy of “science-fiction” video and mixed media works, ‘Hole’, ‘Around’ and ‘Pyramid’ have all explored the idea of art becoming a vehicle for a community’s collective mythology.
Born in 1965. Lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK.
Since 1991 Chodzko has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions: Tate, St Ives; Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); Venice Biennale; Royal Academy, London; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, NY; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Kunstmuseum Luzern etc. Recent projects include commissions by The Contemporary Art Society, Frieze Art Fair, Hayward Gallery, and Creative Time, New York. In 2002 he received awards from the Hamlyn Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York, and in 2007 was awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Film Department at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His work is in the collections of the Tate, The British Council, The Arts Council, APT, Auckland City Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Society Collection, The Creative Foundation, Frac Languedoc-Rousillon, 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, and international private collections.
Current and forthcoming exhibitions include:
Group Exhibitions
English Lounge, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing
14th March – 26th April 2009,
http://www.tangcontemporary.com
Gone To Earth ISIS, London
2nd May - 13th June 2009,
http://www.isisgallery.org/
Purgatory (curated by Diana Baldon).
In 2nd Athens Biennale; HEAVEN 2009
15th June – 4th October 2009,
http://www.athensbiennial.org
Journey's with No Return (curated by Levent Calikoglu, Alice Sharp and Peter Cross).
Istanbul, 8th September till 24th October 2009 (for the Istanbul Biennale)
Tiergarten Kunstverein, Berlin, November 2009,
London, Rochelle School, A Foundation, Shoreditch in February/March 2010 .
This World and Nearer Ones,
commissioned by Creative Time, New York
for Governors Island, NY.
(27th June – August 2009)
www.creativetime.org
Neue Alte Brücke
Frankfurt
www.neuealtebruecke.com
Project commissioned by Art on The Underground:
December 2009
www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/projectsandschemes/artmusicdesign/pfa/
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