May 27 – June 16, 2013
The show features the documentation of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s two most recent projects, both set in New York City. In Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection, carried out in November 2012 at New York’s Union Square, the voices and images of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were projected on the 143-year-old statue of the US president and veteran of the worst war in US history, Abraham Lincoln. The images of contemporary veterans were projected on a monument of a historical figure, inscribing themselves in its symbolic status, while the statue lent them its moral authority. The monument became a medium through which the veterans shared their experiences in public space. For a month the immobile statue was animated with gestures and voices that made it part of the public debate on war and the fate of veterans. Updated in its symbolism, the Lincoln statue had earlier been a silent witness of numerous protests against the Iraq war staged in Union Square.
The second project, yet unrealised, is meant for New York City’s New Museum, on the front elevation of which Krzysztof Wodiczko intends to project an image of the facade of the adjacent Bowery Mission building, which has housed a rescue mission for poor homeless people since 1897. A filmic image of the building’s facade is to be projected on the front elevation the New Museum, whose seven-floor, dynamic, construction (resembling boxes stacked upon each other) has been called an architectural ‘seventh wonder of the world’. Opened in 2007, the New Museum building, an institution for the ‘art of art’, is to become a screen for an institution devoted to the ‘existential art of survival’. Bowery Mission, as Wodiczko says himself, is ‘part of the New Museum’s social and ethical subconscious, a subconscious well hidden under the cover of its windowless facade’. The projection will attempt to expose it. The New Museum was a subject of the artist’s projection in 1984, when it moved to Soho’s Astor Building. The chains and padlocks projected on the building alluded to the relationships between the museum’s arrival and the reconstruction of its surroundings and social restructuring, ‘between the production of cultural space and the production of the homeless’. The current projection, which features the residents of Bowery Mission, was to be presented on 4 May 2013 as part of the project Change of State, which also included planned projections by other artists (Cecil Balmond, Agathe de Bailliencourt, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Nicolas Guagnini, E Roon Kang & Ahrong Han, Sara Ludy, Virginia Overton & Motoko Fukuyama, Jeff Preiss, Martha Rosler, Nicolas Sassoon, Ben Wolf). The project was cancelled a few days before its planned inauguration due to regulations prohibiting the projection of texts on public buildings. The Profile Foundation show presents the film that was to be screened on the New Museum’s facade and a video documenting the process of its making.
