Connections Through Culture 2022-2023 Grant Recipient
Visual artist Adam Chodzko’s Growing a Dream Ecology is a collaborative and socially-engaged visual arts project based around the awkward and slippery subject of nocturnal dreaming. To seek the potential of dreaming as a catalyst to deeper connection between our conscious and unconscious proccesses, its capacity make wild leaps of imagination, and to develop a more rooted form of well-being.
Through research and meeting and listening to an amazing and diverse series of Malaysian individuals Chodzko slowly pieced together the significance, complexity, nuance and extraordinariness of the country’s different cultural entanglements with its dream life.
Project partners:
“but as we looked it suddenly began to change”, was a solo exhibition of Chodzko’s new and recent mixed-media work, presented at Wei-Ling Contemporary in Kuala Lumpur, the gallery of his project partner, Lim Wei-Ling. The exhibition acted as a base, or anchoring point, for the dream research and dialogue that surrounded it.
The exhibition (and Chodzko’s accompanying performative lecture and workshop) offered a series of approaches using different dream structures in order to consider experiences of place, identity, representation and communication as well as to address a colonial gaze. Some works focused on the specificity of very particular locations and communities in Malaysia. A new video work, Jengkuan, was evolved from Chodzko’s chance discovery, near his home in Kent of an archive of amateur photographic 35mm slides showing Kuala Lumpur’s evolution from the 1960’s through to the 1980’s. The work acts as restitution of this unique imagery through a narrator recounting a previous night’s dream.
