Adam Chodzko talks about his work as part of the Falmouth School of Art Guest Speakers series.
Adam Chodzko is an artist working across media, exploring our conscious and unconscious behaviour, social relations and collective imaginations through artworks that are propositions for alternative forms of ‘social media.’ Exhibiting work nationally and internationally since 1991, his work speculates how, through the visual, we might best connect with others.
Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour by investigating the space of consciousness between how we are and what we might be. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work investigates and invents possibilities for collective imagination, questioning ‘how might we perceive better’? Through examining the act of seeing, Chodzko speculates on how, through art and its potential to both be visionary and blinding, we might best engage with the world, as he attempts to reveal concealed realities, ‘hauntings’, lying dormant within the everyday. His practice operates between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism and public and private space, often engaging reflexively and directly with the role of the viewer so that the work appears to be in the process of ‘making itself’ through being seen.
Born in 1965, Chodzko lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK. Since 1991 he has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including Tate Britain and the Royal Academy in London, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo), Biennales in Athens, Istanbul and Venice. Chodzko has been included in many British Council curated international exhibitions of British Art, and has 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. In 2015 Chodzko was shortlisted for the Jarman Awards and in 2016 he received a DACS Art360 Award.