Krzysztof Wodiczko (Warsaw, 1943) graduated in industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He then taught at the city’s University of Technology until moving to Ontario, Canada, in 1977. He later moved to the United States where he taught and directed the Interrogative Design Group at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A socially committed creator, Wodiczko explores the contradictions of power and the social structure of capitalism. His controversial slide and video projections on public spaces, monuments and buildings are internationally recognised. In these projections, public buildings act as a catalyst on the collective memory. The aesthetic power of the images is also apparent in the technological devices used by the artist, which reflect his training as an industrial designer and the way he pioneered, back in the eighties, the use of digital technology. These are devices that expose social problems that are often concealed, such as immigration, homelessness, and the exploitative and restrictive mechanisms of power.

Since 1980, Wodiczko’s projections in the open air and on buildings have been seen in cities in Germany, Australia, Austria, Canada, Spain, United States, United Kingdom, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland and Switzerland. His machines and social devices have travelled round the streets of cities such as Amsterdam, Helsinki, Malmö, Paris and Warsaw, and have been included in numerous international exhibitions, such as the São Paulo Biennale (1965, 1967 and 1985); Paris Biennale (1969 and 1975); Documenta, Kassel (1977 and 1987); Venice Biennale (1986 and 2000): and Sydney Biennial (1979 and 1982). His work is included in the collections of the Center for Contemporay Art, Warsaw; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and MACBA, Barcelona.

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