National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea
This exhibition provides a panoramic view of Krzysztof Wodiczko, exploring all of his identities without reducing him to any one of them. The keywords of the exhibition title—Instruments, Monuments, Projections—refer to the formal elements that link his major activities, while also indicating the chronological changes to his working process. Gallery 5 at MMCA Seoul presents works of instruments and installations created in the late 1960s in Poland along with various Monumental Projections, interrogative designs, and a series of works regarding the brutality of war. They explore themes such as freedom and control in society, criticism of capitalism, issues of discrimination and human rights violation faced by immigrants and homeless people, and the artist’s voice for ending war. Gallery 7 at MMCA Seoul features My Wish (2017), the artist’s new work focused on Korean society, while also allowing us to have a look at the process of making the work.
[source: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/131106/krzysztof-wodiczko-instruments-monuments-projections/]
2015
Exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.
This retrospective provides an overview of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s artworks and develops the main themes of his production over the period 1969–2014. It stresses the importance of his early works, which marked the beginning of the passage from artistic to political issues and from the private sphere to public space.
Works from the 1970s are reminded as the key to his further practice, in which ethical imperative links aesthetics with politics. The period is marked with interdisciplinary experiments and the combination of the tradition of constructivism with the experience of a designer and a neo-avant-gardeartist placing himself against the context of the developments of those times.
These interests are illustrated with recordings of live performances, a series of ironic, self-portrait productions, objects, drawings and documentation of the first interventions in public space. Huge spatial installation of 1972 is being especially reconstructed for the exhibition to introduce the visitors to a long corridor of the eponymous Passages. Another crucial work of this period is called References, in which images of various historic epochs are projected against canvases covered with lines painted on them. Its analytical view upon ideological dimension of what it represents was further developedat the beginning of the 1980s in monumental projects in the public space.
The works of Krzysztof Wodiczko „on behalf of the public domain” and his efforts to make the common space available to all users are evidenced by a vast body of documentation covering the selection from among ca. 90 projections, which took place in various countries and continents. Starting with the first productions dating back to the beginning of the 1980s, which analysed the political sense of architecture as a representation of power, through a series of productions, in which he critically read the history written down in buildings or delivered in response to political developments; Wodiczko’s projections reject the official narrative of monumental history and go against monopolising the collective memory. Film footage presented at the exhibition are meant to remind monumental projections presented since the mid-1990s using the video technique, where Wodiczko enlivened buildings and monuments with images and voices of homeless people, immigrants, victims of violence and abuse, war veterans.
2016
The MUAC is pleased to present Pseudomatismos, the first monographic exhibition of the work of Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in a museum in Mexico. Curated by José Luis Barrios and Alejandra Labastida, the exhibition presents 42 works covering 23 years of audiovisual production, including interactive video pieces, robotics, computerized surveillance, photography and sound installation.
The exhibition features five world premieres at various scales from expansions Pavilion , a huge projection made in collaboration with the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, to Nanopanfletos Babbage gold small booklets were printed in the "Nano Scale Facility" by the Cornell University. In the exhibition several emblematic works as presented Warehouse hunches , who represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Vicious Circle Breathing from the Borusan Contemporary Istanbul Collection and standards and double standards MUAC Collection.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to surrealist automatism, an artistic practice that betting on the creative power of the subconscious and stood on the notion of value in the accidental and random. Lozano Hemmer extends this notion considering the impossibility of randomness in the machinic universe, where any pretense of autonomy in a program is only a simulation. In the words of the artist, a pseudomatismo tries to make tangible the defaults inherent in these simulations . By definition the pseudomatismo is a quasi-voluntary action: the PLC acts 'for himself', the work of Lozano-Hemmer seeks to act contrary ¨ relationship.
The artist of the understanding that technology is not an instrument or tool, but a determination inevitable subjectivity and sociability. Starting the game with touch, sight, breathing, hearing and movement of the public, the exhibition seeks to activate relations machine, environment and perception, to thereby show how technology, the body and the body political are inseparable.
The project will be accompanied by a bilingual catalog with essays by the curators and artist and works commented by Kathleen Forde and Scott McQuire. Far from presenting technological art as something "new" texts delve into the processes and strategies that drive the practice of linking them with traditions of experimental artist in the history of art and science.
In addition to the catalog, a USB memory that contains all source codes used to program the parts of the exhibition will be published. Any programmer can thus access the algorithms and methods that engineers study of Lozano-Hemmer developed for each project, in languages ++, OpenFrameworks, Processing, Delphi, Assembler and Java. To our knowledge this is the first time that an art exhibition will be entirely available with an open source code.
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Massachusetts 2009–2010
Galerie Lelong, 2011
In this multimedia installation viewers experienced a visual and aural narrative conveying the complex psychological and emotional impact that combat has on both military personnel and civilians. Based on interviews and encounters with veterans and civilians from Iraq and Afghanistan, the project placed the viewer inside the conflict but just out of harm’s way, illustrating the horrors of war while calling attention to the fact that only those who directly experience war can truly understand its effects. Viewers enter a darkened gallery space, with the only source of light being projections of horizontal windows along the perimeter towards the ceiling. In projection, the routine sounds of daily life were interrupted by the noise of destruction and chaos as a narrative unfolds across three walls of the gallery.
Quai de la Fosse – Passerelle Victor-Schoelcher, Nantes, 2011
Devoted to the victims of slavery and the slave trade, and to those who stood against the crime, the memorial was erected in Nantes, the premier French slave trading city in the 18th century. Its form is that of a quasi-architectural site that stresses the relationships between memory and public space.
The memorial is situated at the Quai de la Fosse, near the harbor, one of the hubs of triangular trade between Europe and America (delivering slaves to American growers of cash crops exported to Europe), and near a footbridge named after Victor Schoelcher, an abolitionist and government minister who greatly contributed to the abolition of slavery in France in 1848.
The project consists of two parts. The first, above-ground, is a broad landscaped pathway, covering over 7,000 square meters, stretching for some 350 meters along the Loire quays. Into the gravel surface of this esplanade have been set 2,000 glass plaques: 1,710 recalling the slave-trading expeditions that set sail from Nantes, giving ship names and dates of departure; and 290 remembering the names of slave-trading posts and ports in Africa, the West Indies, the Americas, and the Indian Ocean.
The other part is a 140-meter-long underground passage covering a total area of some 1,500 square meters. Alongside the passage runs a huge glass plaque, 90 meters long, displaying a collection of texts from all the continents affected by slave trading over the last five centuries. Visitors are welcomed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and at the western end of the passageway are stated dates and places from the history of slave trading but also those related to the contemporaneous fight against enslavement. As the artist stresses, “The river’s vicinity is important , as its levels rise and fall with the ebbs and flows of the Atlantic. At this shores anchored all the slave ships.”
The Nantes town council decided to erect a commemorative monument at Quai de la Fosse in 1998, on the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France. In 2002, following an international competition, the town selected a project by Krzysztof Wodiczko, designed in association with architect Julian Bonder. Construction work began in 2010.
2010
This responsive illumination system aims to symbolize and express continuing responsiveness and alertness of this Public Safety institution toward the city's safety and quality of life.
In this project, flashes of light on the RHW Public Safety Building are activated by the City’s response to “911” emergency calls. The different light colors correlate to different types of response - blue for police response, red for fire response and green for medical. The faster frequency of flashes is a response to higher priority emergency calls.
The Illumination project in Cambridge investigates the responsibility of the city as its "response-ability," especially at night time.
2010
The project of transforming one of the largest and most important war memorials into a monument that would become an institution acting on behalf of the abolition of war was first presented in the text “Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War,” published in 2010 in the Harvard Design Magazine. In 2011, the artist presented blueprints, a visualization, and a model of the proposed design at the Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie in Paris. The idea was discussed in greater detail in the book The Abolition of War
(London, Black Dog, 2012).
Polish Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition, Venice, 2009
The project coincided with a rise in anti-immigrant views in many European countries. The “guests” are immigrants arriving in Europe where internal borders have been scrapped but external ones are being tightened, and where an official discourse of acceptance and legalization coexists with immigration-regulating procedures. The project featured immigrants residing in Poland and Italy and originally hailing from Chechnya, Ukraine, Vietnam, Romania, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Morocco. Immigrants, who are “not at home” and remain “eternal guests,” were given an opportunity to speak up, to make themselves visible in public space. The projection shows what happens behind the illusion of windows: immigrants performing various chores, washing windows, cleaning, resting, chatting, exchanging comments about their tough living conditions, unemployment, trouble legalizing their stay. The visibility of the different figures is limited, the slightly blurry images making it hard to discern clearly what is really happening behind the glass. This allusion to the visibility of immigrants, who are almost “at a hand’s reach” yet “on the other side,” behind image-distorting windows, refers us to their ambiguous status, their social invisibility.
Organized by the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.
Project curator: Bożena Czubak
Another version of the projection was presented at Atlas Sztuki Gallery, Łódź, 2010.
Galerie Lelong, New York, 2005
The projection coincided with an ongoing homeland security campaign informed by the confrontational policies of the Bush administration and restrictions introduced in the name of the “war on terror.” Drawing its title from the campaign’s slogan, “If you see something, say something,” which fuelled an atmosphere of wariness and suspicion of immigrants, the projection comprised images of four windows showing vague figures of immigrants relating or discussing traumatic experiences, restrictive regulations, humiliating procedures, deportations, or harassment by the Department of Homeland Security. Their accounts illustrated the consequences of repressive policies and the reproduction of strangeness through relations of fear and suspicion. The projection was realized in collaboration with a dozen legal and religious organizations helping immigrants.
Exit Art, New York, 1989
The projection followed clashes between the police and homeless people/squatters residing in and around Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Six large-format photographs showed scenes from a camp set up by homeless people in the park; onto those photographs the artist projected images of military and communications equipment, equipping, as it were, the campers with “weaponry,” showing them as a revolted and organized community. Completing the installation were four smaller-format photographs documenting the actual clashes with the police.
Curator: Jeanette Ingberman
Hal Bromm Gallery, New York, 1987
On the walls of a freshly renovated gallery on the Lower East Side, the artist projected images of three windows facing a run-down area on the eve of redevelopment. Onto the sill of one of the projected windows was superimposed the image of a pair of binoculars lying atop some real-estate magazines. As Dennis Hollier wrote, “Wodiczko exposes the real estate system that requires art: he strips bare its conditions of possibility, puts its place on exhibit; he pulls its function as a preserve out of reserve. For a neighborhood, there is no better sign of improvement than the advent of art galleries.” (Denis Hollier, “While the City Sleeps,” October 64 [1993], p. 7).
