Marlborough Contemporary is pleased to announce British artist Adam Chodzko’s first solo exhibition at the gallery with a new project conceived for the space entitled “Room for Laarni, Image Moderator.”

The mixed media exhibition takes as its starting point the character Laarni, an image moderator from the Philippines, whose job it is to vet a constant stream of images sent between users of Western social networking sites, checking the content for extreme material.

A video work in the style of a Skype chat will introduce Laarni and her role. Her response to the flood of images she encounters daily is further imagined by Chodzko through the presentation of a set of new works using modified found objects and images ranging from circus posters (“Suddenly we all began...”, 2010-2013) to traps (“Mask Filter” series, 2008- 2013), drawings, punctured 35mm photographic slides of sleeping people from 1960s to 1980s, as well as a collection of dust-damaged photographs of natural disasters. These will constitute two separate sets of framed photographic and mixed media works.

The exhibition is imagined as both Laarni’s desktop on her computer screen as well as her unconscious reaction - her dreams, her fears - to the excessive flow of imagery she deals with and the potentially problematic subject matter those images might contain. Chodzko sees the exhibited works as being in various states of pre-moderation, post-moderation, and beyond moderation.

In “Room for Laarni, Image Moderator” Chodzko continues his ongoing exploration of the network of fantasies that both create and disrupt the relationship between the individual and the ‘crowd.’ In a globalised network, Laarni is necessarily remote for economic reasons, and yet she is the one who determines, in an all-seeing manner, the collective visual narrative constructed by social media users in the West.

The Marlborough Contemporary exhibition, which marks the first anniversary for the gallery, comes after an exciting year for Chodzko with an ‘exploded’ Frank Lloyd Wright office, as a response to the Kurt Schwitter’s exhibition at Tate Britain and a two person exhibition with Iain Baxter at Raven Row involving a missing 60 foot palm tree. Forthcoming exhibitions in 2013 include a solo exhibition at the Benaki Museum, Athens.