Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
Project description
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden was a solo exhibition of video and mixed-media works by British artist Adam Chodzko (b. 1965, London), presented at Fujiya Gallery in Beppu following a two-month international residency in Japan. It was Chodzko’s first solo exhibition in a Japanese gallery, bringing together works that explore how communities construct relationships to identity, place, history and the world beyond.
The exhibition developed Chodzko’s ongoing interest in encounters between galleries, audiences, neighbours, artworks and artists. In Rupture 2015, documentary observation becomes entangled with myth, science fiction and psychological surrealism. Acts of empathy are transformed into processes of ‘folding’, in which a gallery becomes a human body, groups of people become figures in a 1960s postcard, and the artist becomes parts of trees within the gallery garden.
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden also considers the idea of a ‘Mixed Bathing World’, the theme of the Beppu Contemporary Art Festival. From the perspective of a Western European artist encountering Japan as an outsider, Chodzko explores an idealised notion of communal innocence through two found postcards based on the same 1963 photograph of people passing through a Beppu arcade.
One postcard presents the photograph in black and white, with two girls visible in the foreground, while the second is hand-coloured and crops the girls from the image while fabricating other details. The altered photograph becomes a starting point for a process of deconstruction undertaken with participants in Kannawa, questioning the status of photographic truth and exploring ideas of innocence, shame, exile and collective memory. Beppu’s steam becomes a metaphor for emotional release and for knowledge that cannot be fully controlled.
In Somewhere Else, In Order to Complete Them, Chodzko constructs a fictional mythology in which artists are credited with shaping Beppu’s identity, including the suggestion that a 1970s artistic intervention caused the city’s continuous eruptions of steam. The work connects Chodzko’s practice in Kent with the geological activity of Beppu, creating an imagined relationship between distant places. Moving-image works presented in Kannawa extend towards other locations, including Governors Island in New York, Athens and Belgrade.
A video installation documenting Japanese audiences watching the work at Fujiya Gallery was subsequently presented in the UK at Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury. The resulting ‘video of a video’ repeats the act of looking and being observed, questioning where and how an individual or community might locate itself within a wider world.
In Our Host Postponed the Drinks Until After the Storm, the gallery becomes a point of connection between neighbouring buildings. A proposed bamboo plumbing system is designed to carry a drink between neighbours, but the exchange is interrupted by a storm, leaving the bamboo structures pruned and bandaged in the gallery garden. Inside the gallery, the remains become a seemingly useless art object, while photographs of the neighbours record their continued anticipation of an exchange that never takes place.
Here. consists of a pair of momohiki, traditional Japanese agricultural work trousers, together with branches pruned from the trees in the Fujiya Gallery garden. Each branch pointing towards 280°43′00′′, the direction of Chodzko’s home in Whitstable, Kent, is cut from the tree. The intervention permanently alters the garden, while the branches, dressed in the trousers, appear to move away and return towards the artist’s home.
Through video, photography, installation and intervention, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden examines the relationships between belonging, displacement, memory and place. Chodzko’s works transform everyday encounters and local environments into unstable narratives in which documentary evidence, fiction and collective imagination continually overlap.
Bio
Adam Chodzko (b. 1965, London) is a British contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores relationships between individuals, communities, places and systems of belief. Working across video, installation, photography, sculpture and performance, he frequently combines documentary processes with fictional narratives, social encounters and acts of participation.
Chodzko has exhibited internationally at institutions and exhibitions including Tate Britain, Tate St Ives, the Venice Biennale, PS1 in New York, Ikon Gallery, the Henry Moore Institute and the Folkestone Triennial. His work has been commissioned by Creative Time in New York, Frieze Art Fair, Hayward Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella. His work has also featured in exhibitions curated by the British Council, including General Release at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and Private Utopia in Japan in 2014.
Project details
Year: 2015
Artist: Adam Chodzko
Exhibition: Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
Venue: Fujiya Gallery, Beppu
Curated by: Keith Whittle
Residency: Kashima Artist in Residence 2015
Programme Director: Keith Whittle
Commissioned and co-produced with: Beppu NPO
Support: Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan
Duration: Two-month international residency
Country: Japan