Reenactment: Adam Chodzko
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. His first solo exhibition in a Japanese gallery, it explored how communities construct relationships to identity, place, history and the world beyond.
The exhibition extended Chodzko’s investigation of encounters between artists, audiences, neighbours and artworks. In Rupture (2015), documentary observation merges with myth, science fiction and psychological surrealism. Acts of empathy become processes of “folding”: the gallery transforms into a human body, people become figures in a 1960s postcard, and the artist becomes part of the trees in the gallery garden.
Responding to the Beppu Contemporary Art Festival’s theme of Mixed Bathing World, Chodzko’s video work examines an idealised vision of communal innocence through two found postcards reproducing a 1963 photograph of people in a Beppu arcade. One shows the image in black and white, with two girls in the foreground; the other is hand-coloured, removes the girls and invents new details. Through reenactment with participants in Kannawa, Chodzko deconstructs the photograph, questioning photographic truth and confronting ideas of innocence, shame, exile and collective memory. Beppu’s rising steam becomes a metaphor for emotional release and knowledge beyond control.
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 combines documentary observation with fiction, participation and speculative narratives to examine identity, memory and collective imagination.
Chodzko has exhibited internationally at Tate Britain, Tate St Ives, PS1 in New York, Ikon Gallery and the Venice Biennale. His work has also been presented through major commissions and exhibitions organised by Creative Time, Hayward Gallery, Film and Video Umbrella and the British Council, establishing an international practice that connects contemporary art with social and cultural questions.
Recent projects include Ghost at Haworth Art Gallery (2024) and The Dreamshare Seer (2024–25), alongside collaborations with Cement Fields. Through site-responsive projects and moving-image works, Chodzko continues to investigate the relationships between art, ecology, place and shared experience, creating situations in which everyday life, imagined worlds and collective histories intersect.
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