Harvard University (the Graduate School of Design)
ESOF2024 | 12–15 June 2024 | Katowice, Poland
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Position and institutional affiliation
BIO
KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO
Krzysztof Wodiczko born 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Warsaw.
He is renowned for his large-scale projections on architectural facades, and monuments. He has realized 90 of such projections in 20 countries.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor of Art Design and the Public Domain, Emeritus at Graduate School of Design at Harvard
And Visiting Professor at the Media Arts Department of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
Since the 1980s, his projections as well as especially designed performative instruments engage marginalized city residents in developing and disseminating their public voice and expression.
He has held major retrospective exhibitions at Walker Art Center, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, DOX Art Center, Muzeum Sztuki, F.A.C.T Liverpool, M. M. C. A. in Seoul, and many other museums and art centers.
Krzysztof Wodiczko work has been exhibited at Documenta (twice), Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Liverpool Biennale and other art festivals and exhibitions.
He received the 4th Hiroshima Art Price "for his contribution as an international artist to the world peace".
His works are in the public collections of the Hirschhorn Museum, New York MoMa, Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Poland, Macba, Walker Art Center, and many other museums and private collections.
Krzysztof Wodiczko work is being presented as a part of PBS television series Art in the Twenty-First Century, and in Art 21 Extended Play.
A fim Krzysztof Wodiczko; Art of Un-War directed by Maria Niro has been released in 2022
Title of the lecture
What if Monument Could Speak?
The well-being of the democratic process depends on the communicative and discursive vitality of the public space.
Such vitality depends on the creation of psychosocial and cultural and technological conditions for the people to open-up and fearlessly speak in public, as well as on devising the aesthetic and media means for their speech transmission, and public reception.
My work seeks to create such conditions through the participatory and media appropriation of city symbolic structures, such as monuments, facades, and statues, as historically charged ‘screens’ onto which the meaning can be inscribed and re-inscribed, and thus exchanged.
In such communicative projects the priority should be given to these city residents, whose voice has been least heard and whose existential experience, and critical needs have been least known and publicly acknowledged. In building better life for everyone, the voice of marginalized and neglected people must be heard first.
Blank facades and blind eyes of lofty civic monuments face speechless and estranged city residents living in their shadows. It is my belief that many city residents- these silent monuments to their own trauma-as well as many historic city monuments- themselves speechless and traumatized by the injustice they witness- should be given a chance to join each other, break their silence, regain their voice, and speak.
In my presentation, I will elaborate on the social, psychological, technological, aesthetic, and design aspects of my projections, installations and instrumentations developed with the less privileged city dwellers who for the sake of the amelioration of their own lives, lives of others, and by extension the society at large, have made use of such projects to appear, speak, and be heard in the public space.
