ABOUT US
Project Overview
"LEFT TO DECAY is an immersive exhibition by visual artist Adam Soch — photography, video, and collected objects from over 150 abandoned sites across rural Romania. Large-format prints, four-wall video projection, and remnants gathered from the sites themselves. A project about what was left behind, and what it costs to forget it."
LEFT TO DECAY creates space for remembering what was, understanding why it was lost, and imagining how we care for what remains.
Meet the Artist: Adam Soch
I was born in Romania and left at twenty-four. I spent the next four decades in Los Angeles — working as a video artist and multimedia producer, creating immersive projections for major theater productions, and collaborating with the late visionary director Reza Abdoh. My work entered the permanent collection of MOCA Los Angeles and was shown at MoMA PS1 New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, and the Music Center of Los Angeles, among others. For thirty-three years I produced Classic Arts Showcase, a twenty-four-hour arts television channel broadcast across the United States.
Then I came back to Romania.
Seven years ago I returned to Cluj-Napoca — the country I was shaped by, and had watched change from a distance for most of my adult life. What I found in the countryside stopped me: hundreds of abandoned homes, manor houses, castles, and churches, disappearing quietly, with no one watching. I started photographing them. I could not stop.
LEFT TO DECAY is what that work became.
“Stunning, remarkable, and compelling…”
Los Angeles Times
ABOUT ME
GALLERY
Explore the Gallery
Fragments of What Remains
"Selected photographs from the archive. Each site documented, catalogued, and prepared for exhibition."
All content © Adam Soch. Unauthorized use is not permitted.
VIDEO GALLERY
Stories of Forgotten Places
Into the Empty Rooms
Experience the textures of abandonment in motion. Each filmic fragment reveals close studies of rusted hardware, fractured light, and household objects draped in dust, assembling quiet narratives of absence and memory. Shot and mastered for projection, these videos move slowly through rooms and exteriors to preserve atmosphere, listen for echoes, and allow the sites themselves to tell their histories.
All content © Adam Soch. Unauthorized use is not permitted.
