Adam Chodzko is an artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent. His work, Ghost, was selected for Sculpture in the City, an annual public art exhibition in the City of London, in which contemporary art pieces are placed in and around the Square Mile from 9th of July 2015 – May 2016. The Sculpture in the City art exhibition is a unique collaboration between the City of London Corporation, local businesses, and the art world, providing the opportunity for new audiences to engage with established and emerging contemporary artists, including works from internationally renowned artists Damien Hirst, Sigalit Landau and Bruce Beasley.
Adam Chodzko’s, Ghost is a kayak, a sculpture as vessel, a coffin, a costume and a camera rig. He designed the kayak to have a paddler in the back and a passenger – a member of the public in the front. The passenger is reclined, stretched out like a body in a coffin, with their head slightly raised. They occupy the horizontal interface between sky and water in an attempt to experience a state between sleep and wake, living and dying. A dome in the deck of the kayak also separates them physically and visually from the paddler at the back. Through each journey for Ghost, the artist and the passenger are on a metaphorical and mythological journey to the Island of the Dead. A camera, mounted on the bows, records the journey of each passenger, thus creating an archive of their experience. No two journeys are the same.
This year a total of fifteen works are set to transform the EC3 insurance area. The Historic Leadenhall Market will again be used as a dramatic backdrop, when Adam Chodzko’s Ghost, a 22 foot wooden kayak, is suspended from the ceiling of the ornate Victorian structure.
Chodzko’s art works has been exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Tate, St Ives; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); Istanbul Biennale, Venice Biennale; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. His work focuses on the relational politics of culture’s edges, endings, displacements, transitions and disappearances through provocatively looking in the ‘wrong’ places” – a search for knowledge through instability. Chodzko operates in the tight, poetic spaces between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, public and private space, often engaging reflexively and directly with the role of the viewer.
Complementary educational workshops, run by Open-City, will inspire schoolchildren from the local area before and after the project installation.
For more info go to: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/sculptureinthecity
