Adam Chodzko, The Pickers, 2009, Production sketch for video installation with sound. 14 minutes. Courtesy the artist.
The Pickers shows a group of Romanian migrant workers at a UK strawberry farm who alternate their intensive strawberry picking with the editing and mediation of a 20th century film archive of British migrant hop pickers. Sited in a parallel reality, distinctions are blurred as to where and when events are set, as they are between notions of labour and leisure, and the identity of an archive and its dissemination. ‘The Pickers’ becomes a dream; a Romanian advertisement to British migrant workers to come to Romania.
Adam Chodzko’s multi-media work explores the potential for interactions within human behavior. He has recently created future ‘documentaries’ to fabricate myths for a community and instigated a ritual of the temporary swapping of shoes in order to both destabilize and connect individuals. Through combining people, places and images Chodzko generates unusual circumstances that evoke a new way of looking, proposing new and fantastic relationships between our value and belief systems and the community and the private spaces that generate these systems. Often using forms of anthropology, he focuses on the politics of culture’s edge, endings, displacements and disappearances.
Adam Chodzko was born in London and lives and works in Kent, UK. He has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Venice Biennale, Royal Academy, Deste Foundation in Athens and PS1 in New York and Athens Biennial. He was commissioned by Frieze Art Fair in 2004, Creative Time, NY in 2009 and held a solo show at Tate St Ives in 2008, was part of Folkestone Triennial in 2008 and the British Council Group Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade in 2007.