Krzysztof Wodiczko

GD 102 Westwood College/La Paz Community School

Mendoza

Krzysztof Wodiczko

• Artist currently living in Boston and teaching at MIT

• Born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw in 1968 with a degree in industrial design

• Most well known for his large-scale outdoor projections, which have been installed in over a dozen countries

• Works are usually socially conscious, and often political in nature

The Homeless Vehicle Project

• A controversial project of his was the design and construction of a special cart for homeless people

• After consultation with homeless people in New York City, the cart could be used to transport a small number of belongings, provided space for the collection of bottles, and could be used as a primitive shelter

The Process

• 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

CECUT ProjectTijuana, Mexico

The purpose was to use progressive technology to give voice and visibility to the women who work in the "maquiladora" industry in

Tijuana

Two projectors and loudspeakers that transmitted the testimonies live

The women's testimonies focused on a variety of issues including work related abuse, sexual abuse, family disintegration, alcoholism, and domestic violence

These problems were shared live by the participants, in a public plaza on two consecutive nights, for an audience of more than 1,500. projections on the 60-foot diameter facade of the Omnimax Theater at the Centro Cultural Tijuana

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.

Martin Luther Church Kassel Germany

In 1987 the artist projected a controversial image onto the Martin Luther Church in Kassel Germany, one of the few buildings to have survived the allied bombings of World War II

It was a great irony that in 1987 the city of Kassel experienced an "evacuation alert" due to the threat of industrial pollution from nearby factories

The artwork is of a person praying in a hazardous materials protective suite.

"The attack must be unexpected, frontal, and must come with the night when the building, undisturbed by it's daily function, is asleep and when it's body dreams of itself. This will be a symbol-attack, a

public, psychoanalytical seance, unmasking and revealing the unconscious of the building, it's body, the medium of power."

Veterans’s Flame

Wodiczko conducted the interviews in April 2009, interested in having his subjects explore, through the act of remembering and retelling, the complex psychological space between the battlefield and their

homes

Image of a candle flame moves with the recorded voices of veterans sharing accounts of war and its aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wodiczko designs projections that operate at the intersection of democracy and trauma. They aim to afford the chance for those

silenced by trauma to find their voices.

The Hiroshima ProjectionHiroshima, Japan

Projections at ground zero of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, Japan

At its center is a peace monument, a concrete building that survived the blast and has become a shrine and memorial

The projection at the peace monument is a recreation of other events and experiences which are still present in Hiroshima and outside

Hiroshima

Even people who are 3rd generation from the blast- they somehow have found a connection to the monument

If you see something…

Initiated and perpetuated by a society's fear of "the stranger“

Projected onto the gallery walls will be images of frosted windows, behind which people recount and exchange various stories that each

unfold as a compelling witness to the abuse of power

In one story, a young man being beaten by authorities, already defeated, does not protest; in another, family members of an

accused terrorist plead for his release, claiming a forced confession

As the intensely emotional and vivid narratives inside the gallery space are juxtaposed with the ambiguous imagery of dark, moving

figures behind the windows, blurred are the distinctions between "us" and "them," between what is assumed and what is real