Krzysztof Wodiczko - Recent Work

Recent Work

While working on Porte-parole in Europe, Wodiczko received an invitation from the filmmaker Andrzej Wajda to participate in an urban festival in Krakow using for the first time powerful Barco NV video projectors. Working with the Women’s Center, he merged for the first time the testimonial work that had evolved from his work with instruments with the visual impact of his well-known large-scale public projections. Testimony of domestic abuse spoken from the City Hall Tower created shockwaves in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture of denial.

In this way, Wodiczko continued in his testimonial video projections to respond to the needs of urban society’s marginal citizens who frequently survive outside the usual boundaries of juridical and social resources. In 2001, he merged the means of his instruments with the purpose of the projections in his Tijuana Projection executed for InSite 2000. In this public intervention, women working in the “maquiladora” industry of Tijuana, Mexico wore media technology designed to project their faces onto El Centro Cultural as they spoke emotionally of incest, police abuse, and work place discrimination in real time. As participants, their parrhesiatic speech was courageously offered at great risk to themselves for the purpose of moral and political change. Through the video projections, Wodiczko continues to develop the potential for aesthetic practice to effect social change as part of a wider discourse on agonistic pluralism prompted by such influences as Chantal Mouffe and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The role of art in understanding and confronting conflict becomes an increasingly significant aspect of both Wodiczko’s aesthetic and pedagogical practices. This is true in his continued work with immigrants and his recent work with war veterans in the Veteran Vehicle Project as well as his public lectures and teaching seminars worldwide including his seminar on “Trauma, Conflict, and Art” for the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. Recently, Wodiczko has also created projections for the interiors of cultural spaces as a metaphor for our psychological isolation from broader social and political experience. His 2005 exhibition at Galerie Lelong in New York City, If you see something…, his 2009 installation in the Polish Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, Guests, and his 2009-2010 interior projection at the ICA Boston, …Out of here, all position the viewer in relation to the consequences of global capitalism and the conflict produced as a result of the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Krzysztof Wodiczko believes in the necessity for intellectuals to participate actively in society forging, as critic Jan Avgikos points out, “a commitment to resistance and truth-telling that, while often derided as outmoded or impossible, remains a basic human impulse.”