Catalogue > At random

In Knots, Adam Chodzko focuses on the remote but important relationship between the artist Kurt Schwitters, in the final years of his life in the late 1940’s, living in poverty and exile in England’s Lake District, and J. Edgar Kaufmann, the wealthy owner of the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh, USA. Kaufmann had arranged for money to be wired to Schwitters so that he could develop a new Merz structure. Chodzko plays with the desire to conclude and tie up the loose and disparate ends of this narrative. He imagines the now empty Merzbarn (Schwitters final work having been removed to a Newcastle museum in 1965) as a vacuum, sucking in thoughts, desires and matter; all caught up in the vortex of a dream-like surreality. Kaufmann had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his Pittsburgh office, a structure that itself was also later displaced from its source when donated to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Chodzko sees the interior spaces that Schwitters and Kaufmann worked within as unstable, flowing, collaged together, as though becoming a Merz themselves, whilst the form of the video also echoes this process of construction and deconstruction. Knots is a mesmerizing combination of fact and fiction, text and moving image building a story about longing, creation and fragmentation, endings and beginnings, networks of people and isolated individuals, separations and notions of home. It was commissioned by Tate Britain in 2012.

Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour by investigating the space between how we are and how we could 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 the possibilities of collective imagination through using a poetics of everyday life. By wondering how, through the visual, we might best engage with the existence of others he reveals the realities that emerge from the search for this knowledge. Chodzko's art proposes new relationships between our value and belief systems, exploring their effect on our communal and private spaces and the documents and fictions that control, describe and guide them. Working directly with the networks of people and places that surround him, often using forms of anthropology, Chodzko focuses on the relational politics of culture's edges, endings, displacements, transitions and disappearances through a provocative looking in the 'wrong' place; a search for knowledge through instability. His art is catalysed by imagining a collapse of the category of Art, requiring not only a new audience but also a new status for the art object. Chodzko’s practice operates in the tight, poetic spaces he evolves between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, and public and private space, often engaging reflexively and directly with the role of the viewer. Intimate collections and ephemeral communities are frequently generated 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 and M-path, the collection and distribution of perception-changing footwear for gallery visitors. More recently a trilogy 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, whilst Echo, The Pickers and Ghost elaborate these themes through excavating processes of memory, empathy and the imaginary. Because, 2013 (at Tate Britain) and We are Ready for your Arrival, 2013 (at Raven Row) further develop these ideas through manifestations of the unconscious relationships between individuals and groups; their excesses and disappearances. Born in 1965. Lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK. Since 1991 Chodzko has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Raven Row, London; Tate Britain; Tate, St Ives; Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); The Benaki Museum, Athens; Athens Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Venice Biennale; Royal Academy, London; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, NY; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Kunstmuseum Luzern etc. Recent projects include commissions by Creative Time, New York, The Contemporary Art Society, Frieze Art Fair, and Hayward Gallery. 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 British Film Institute, 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.