Krzysztof Wodiczko was
born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York
and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1980, he has created more than
seventy large-scale
slide and video projections of politically-charged
images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide.
By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for
projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture
and monuments reflect collective memory and history. In 1996 he
added sound and motion to the projections and began to collaborate
with communities around chosen projection sites, giving voice to
the concerns of heretofore marginalized and silent citizens who
live in the monuments’ shadows. Projecting images of community
members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural
façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies,
Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions
of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark
monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of
notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence,
alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social
interaction in present-day society. Wodiczko has also developed ‘instruments’ to
facilitate survival, communication, and healing, for homeless people
and immigrants. These therapeutic devices, which Wodiczko envisions
as technological prosthetics or tools for empowering and extending
human abilities, address physical disability as well as economic
hardship, emotional trauma, and psychological distress. Wodiczko
heads the Interrogative Design Group and is Director of the Center
for Art, Culture, and Technology, formerly known as the Center
for Advanced Visual Studies, at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. His work has appeared in many international exhibitions,
including the São Paulo Bienale (1965, 1967, 1985); Documenta
(1977, 1987); the Venice Biennale (1986, 2000); and the Whitney
Biennial (2000). Wodiczko received the 1999 Hiroshima Art Prize
for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004
College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Galerie Lelong, New York |
