Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko (1943) is an artist renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments.

War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of an oeuvre that spans four decades. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.

He has realized more than 80 public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

He lives and works in New York City and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is currently professor in residence of art, design, and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.

Publications

Books

• Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, MIT Press, 1999, 227 pp.
• September 11: City of Refuge, 2009.
• Guests, Charta, 2009.
• Krzysztof Wodiczko, 2012.
• The Abolition of War, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013.
  • Obalenie Wojenby, MOCAK, 2014. Expanded edition. (Polish)
• Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016. Collection of writings.

Essays

• "Public Projection", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7:1-2 (Spring 1983), p 187-193.
• "Open Transmission", Performance Research 2:3, 1997, pp 1-8.
• "The Tijuana Projection, 2001", Rethinking Marxism 15:3, Jul 2003, pp 422-423.
• "The Transformative Avant-Garde: A Manifest of the Present", Third Text 28:2, 2014, pp 111-122.
• with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, "Zoom Pavilion", in The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp 285-288. [1]

Interviews

• Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko", October 38, Autumn 1986, pp 23-51.
• "Krzysztof Wodiczko interviewed by Malcolm Dickson", Variant 6, 1989, p 17.
• Patricia C. Phillips, "Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko", Art Journal 62:4, Winter 2003, pp 32-47.
• Marc James Léger, "Aesthetic Responsibility: A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko on the Transformative Avant-Garde", Third Text 28:2, 2014, pp 123-136.
• Marc James Léger, "Homeless Projection: Place des arts: An Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko", Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2:3, 2015.

Literature

• Rosalyn Deutsche, "Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Homeless Projection" and the Site of Urban 'Revitalization'", October 38, Autumn 1986, pp 63-98.
• Neil Smith, "Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale", Social Text 33, 1992, pp 54-81. [2]
• Rosalyn Deutsche, "Sharing Strangeness: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Ægis and the Question of Hospitality", Grey Room 6, Winter 2002, pp 26-43. [3]
• Sarah J. Purcel, "Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument", The Public Historian 25:2, Spring 2003, pp 55-71.
• Marie Fraser, "Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff", in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008, pp 249-263. [4]
• Marc James Léger, "Xenology and Identity: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Immigrant Instruments", 2011.
• Dora Apel, "Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post-9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko", ch 1 in Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Images, Rutgers University Press, 2012, pp 17-46. [5]

Links

• Profile on GSD Harvard
• Works and biography on Culture.pl
• http://www.fundacjaprofile.pl/wystawy.php?act=more&a=275
• Wikipedia