Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko's artistic projects stage a dynamic and vivid encounterbetween aesthetics, ethics and technology. For almost 40 years, theartist's powerful and extensive body of work has deployed contemporarytechnologies to engage with the problematics of alterity, socialresponsibility and urban experience. Believing that ‘public art'should perform an ethical interruption of existing social processes andtheir ideological underpinnings, Wodiczko's critical interventions in theurban environment have addressed issues of urban violence, homelessness,alienation and wartime trauma.Since the 1980s, he has produced large-scale slide and video projections,transforming the facades of official buildings and historical monumentsinto temporary spaces for critical reflection and public protest. ThePublic Projections series include: The Grand Army Plaza Memorial Arch,Brooklyn, NY (1983), The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1988), TheWhitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989), Bunker Hill Monument,Boston (1998), A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima (1999) and El Centro Cultural,Tijuana, Mexico (2001).By nature, Wodiczko's work is often controversial and the book looks at hisdevelopment of a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless andimmigrant operators that function as implements for survival,communication, empowerment, and healing. The Homeless Vehicle project inNew York City, equips nomadic ‘evicts' with tools forself-articulation, whilst the elaborate Xenology instruments are designedto empower the ‘immigrant' by providing access to speech andfiguration in the public realm. Like much of his work, his interrogativedesigns and portable instruments are animated by a desire to bring thesocially opaque into the public sphere of appearances, to restore voice andvisibility to those rendered mute within the parameters of the publicdomain.Krzysztof Wodiczko is the first full-scale study of the artist's work, itsethico-political imperatives, and the diverse interpretive lenses whichaccompany its theorization. Developed in close collaboration with theartist, and bringing together an array of essays by leading scholars from avariety of disciplines, the book represents the most significant andsustained engagement with the artist's practice to date.