Adam Chodzko

Adam Chodzko (based in Whitstable, Kent) is a contemporary visual artist exploring the interactions and possibilities of our beliefs and behaviours.

Investigating the space between what we think we are, and what we could become, his heterogeneous body of work ranges from video, performance, drawing and sculpture to socially-engaged processes and is situated both in the gallery and ‘non-art’ public sites beyond it. His art invents possibilities for collective imagination, wondering how, through our play with the visual, we might perceive our world more deeply, in order to transform our connections with others? Adam’s work asks; Through vision, how can we be? Engaging reflexively with the viewer his artworks create a space between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, remoteness and intimacy, and public and private space. His creative system weaves together, into a single body of work (imagined as a living body and a garden), contexts as diverse as communication, consciousness, attention, perception, disavowal, embodiment, belief, magick, ritual, ethnography, digital technology, ecology, climate change, migration, place, identity, history, community, etc.

Recent works have continued explorations into the ecological relationships between place, perception, identity, mythology, ritual, language, the body and the unconscious. Examining our capacities for attention, shame, awkwardness, care and perception, his book Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs...is staged within his long relationship with a 15th C. Pieter Bruegel painting.

Current major projects include a process to turn descriptions of a community's nocturnal dreams into visual animations. The Dreamshare Seer, the dreaming ecology of an island (initially the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, close to where Adam lives, in Whitstable), is visually co-created between its inhabitants and AI, and guided by indigenous Malaysian dream knowledge.

Since 1991 Adam has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Tate Britain; Tate, St Ives; Raven Row, London; 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, Wellcome Trust, Frieze Art Fair, and Hayward Gallery.

Adam has been included in many British Council curated international exhibitions of British Art, from General Release (1995) at the Venice Biennale, to Micro/Macro: British Art 1996-2002,(2003), Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Breaking Step (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and Private Utopia (2014), Japan. In 2002 he received awards from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, and in 2007 was awarded an AHRC Practice -Led Research Fellowship in the Film Department at the University of Kent. In 2015 Adam was shortlisted for the Jarman Awards. In 2016 he received a DACS Art360 Award. In 2023, he was awarded a British Council Connections Through Culture Grant to create a project focused on collective dreaming in Malaysia, an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant for a project evolving from a community's collective dream descriptions, translating them via Artificial Intelligence into animations, and a Practice-Led PhD from Leeds Beckett University’s School of Arts to extend the research for this project: https://dreamshareseer.org/.

https://www.adamchodzko.com/

Photo of the artist by Richard Boll. Project photo: Adam Chodzko, The Dreamshare Seer, Sketch for The Dreamshare Seer, still from the collective dream bus on marshes, 2025.