Wed 10 March 2010 at 4.00 pm

Department of Arts Research Seminar: Adam Chodzko

Taking Place: RHB115

Adam Chodzko

  
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.