16.12.2011-4.02.2012
The exhibition Art of Public Domain presents photographic and video documentation of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projection, which are an artistic answer to the question of “what can we do for public space to become truly public?”
A series of photographs, most of them taken by the artist himself, portrays several dozen projections, starting with the early 1980s slide shows, in which architecture served as a screen for critical interventions in city space. The photographs document the artist’s successive projects, which involved often iconic buildings and monuments, a critical reading of their history, deconstruction of ideological narratives, and interaction with public space.
The documentation covers all of the artist’s monumental projections, carried out since the mid-1990s, in which he uses video technology to animate public buildings and memorial sites with the images and voices of homeless people, immigrants, victims of violence, war veterans, marginalised minorities. The exhibition presents the successive projections in which the artist creates the possibility for others to appear in public space, equipping them with communication devices allowing them to be heard and seen. In all these practices find application the technologies of “protest, dissent, critical and agonistic memory” – instruments of democracy that are to serve the practical use of public space.
The exhibition is accompanied by a special catalogue featuring documentation of last projections realized in cooperation with war veterans.
Curator: Bożena Czubak
Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in 1943 in Warsaw, lives and works in New York City, Boston and Warsaw.
A multimedia artist, art theoretician and university professor. Currently he is a professor of the Art, Design and the Public Domain at Harvard University, Cambridge. He also teaches at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1980, he has carried out over 90 projections in several dozen countries on different continents. Using transparencies and video streams, shown in galleries and museum spaces or projected on building walls and public monuments, charged with political and social meanings, the projections dealt with the issues of human rights, democracy, violence and alienation. Starting with Town Hall Tower Projection (Krakow, 1996), the artist began animating city monuments and public buildings with images and voices of the projections’ participants. He is the author of a series of vehicles and instruments refl ecting his critical-utopian strategy. In the 1970s, he made allegorical projects — Vehicles, commenting on the limits of freedom in the political space of 1970s Poland. In the subsequent decades, he continued working on instruments and vehicles designed for the homeless, immigrants, and war veterans: Homeless Vehicle (1988–1989), Poliscar (1991), Alien Staff (1992),Porte-Parole (1993), Agis (1998), Dis-Armor (1999), War Veteran Vehicle (2008).
