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Krzysztof Wodiczko: Monument, Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York City, New York, January 16 - May 10, 2020

Krzysztof Wodiczko collaborated with twelve refugees who have been resettled in the United States; their filmed likenesses and spoken narratives are superimposed on the historic 1881 monument to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, lauded in his day as a Union naval hero during the Civil War. Pertinent to this project is current scholarship documenting how the American Civil War drove millions – soldiers, civilians, stragglers, enslaved Africans, free people, Northerners and Southerners – from their homes to generate a nineteenth-century refugee crisis. Similarly, each filmed participant’s home country has suffered the devastation of civil war which prompted Wodiczko to choose the Farragut location for this project to compare how select individuals are lionized in wartime and others are overlooked. With footage of people from Africa, Central America, South Asia, and the Middle East, the bronze monument emerges as a surrogate for refugees whose diverse plights, harrowing journeys, grueling fortitude, and quest for democracy have recently brought them to this country. Refugees are adults and children who flee their home countries because of war, persecution, and violence and who cross borders into the promised safety of another country. Most of the speakers in this project have spent years in refugee camps.

In Review

Exhibitions

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Instruments, Monuments, Projections, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, July 5 - October 9, 2017

Disarming Memory, Fundacja Profile, Warsaw, Poland, November 10 - December 3, 2016

Jozef Rotblat Institute for Disarmament of Culture and Abolition of War Project, with Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, October 6 - November 27, 106

CAFA Art Museum and World Art Museum, Beijing Media Art Biennial, Beijing - September 25 - December 9, 2016

Veteran Flame, Home Land Security, FOR-SITE Foundation, Fort Winfield Scott at Langdon Court, September 10 - December 18

Guests, Central Subway Station, Warsaw, Poland, October 2016

Die Ermittler/The Investigators, Weimar, Germany, August 26-28, 2016

Zoom Pavillion w Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Art Basel 47, Basek, Switzerland, 2016

Migrations/Creations 2: Entrance to the Port, Emigration Museum, Gdynia, Poland, June 6 - July 17, 2016

Un-War and Positive Peace, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool Bienalle, England

Acquisitions

Homeless Vehicle, Hirshhorn Collection, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C, USA

Lectures

Symposium on the occasion of the exhibition of the Jozef Rotblat Institute for Disarmament of Culture and Abolition of War Project Proposal, Warsaw, Poland

Book Launch for Socjo Estetyka, Warsaw, Poland

Workshop with Hishashi Muori, Yokohama University, Japan

Photographer's Gallery, London, U.K, July 18

Anachronometics: All that is Solid, Symposium, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, October 14

Introduction, Christo Lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, October 2

MONUMENT / ANTIMONUMENT, Arsenale, Paris, France, November 7

Monument Therapy, Lowell Humanities Lecture, Boston College, MA, USA, November 10

Teaching

Visiting Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Media Art, Warsaw, Poland

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA USA

Publishing

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Published by Black Dog Publishing (October 25, 2016)

"Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings is a comprehensive collection of writings by the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko spanning from the 1970s to the present day. Known for his large-scale, politically charged video and slide projections onto prominent architectural structures, this publication explores the development of Wodiczko's political, theoretical and social motovations in relation to his practice. These writings encompass the artist's ongoing critique of public space and his argument for the integral role that art plays in challenging the institutionalised and national narratives inscribed in the architecture of urban environments, and therefore in the democratic process. Working with marginalised city residents since the 1980s as active, critical democratic agents, Wodizcko explores the political and psychological potential of "fearless" or parrhesiastic speaking in the reanimation of our public spaces and monuments."

SOCJOESTETYKA, Krytyka Polityczna (2016)

Gdyby ściany miały uszy… A gdyby miały ręce, oczy, co gdyby dać im język? Co na przykład powiedziałaby Kopuła Bomby Atomowej w Hiroszimie? Co wie Kolumna Nelsona na Trafalgar Square albo pomnik Abrahama Lincolna w Nowym Jorku? Krzysztof Wodiczko od lat ożywia pomniki, uczłowiecza je – uwalnia je od ciężaru wielkiej historii i „wświetla” w nie małe historie zwyczajnych ludzi. W Tijuanie zamienił kopułę La Bola w rzeczniczkę poniżanych i prześladowanych robotnic, ofiar przemocy, gwałtów, kazirodztwa…

Również wywiad-rzeka jest dla Wodiczki okazją do opowiedzenia cudzych historii. Artysta używa tego skrajnie egotycznego medium, by „wświetlić” w nie historie emigrantów, ofiar wojen, wykluczonych kobiet, wreszcie swoją własną.