calendario eventi  :: 

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9/9/2005

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Galerie Lelong, New York

If you see something...

Galerie Lelong will reopen next Saturday, September 10, with If you see something..., an exhibition of new work by Krzysztof Wodiczko.

If you see something...presents the first large-scale indoor projection by Krzysztof Wodiczko, one of the leading artists of critical new media who is renowned for projections that have challenged authority through the intervention of public space. The exhibition will launch the fall season at
Galerie Lelong and opens to the public on Saturday, September 10, from 6 to8 p.m. The artist will be present at the opening.

A truly interdisciplinary artist, Wodiczko has for three decades merged elements from industrial design, digital media, performance, and architecture to address pertinent issues of politics, sociology, and psychology. He is most known for staging projections onto the facades of public monuments and buildings, using structures at the heart of the city’s identity to tell the stories of citizens often overlooked by society. The artist has also created a complex body of instruments and vehicles that are each designed to communicate and remedy the alienation of a particular group of people.

Alluding in the exhibition’s title to the ubiquitous ads seen on mass transit, Wodiczko continues in If you see something...his dialogue on the marginalization largely initiated and perpetuated by a society’s fear of “the stranger.” Projected onto the gallery walls will be images of frosted
windows, behind which people recount and exchange various stories that each unfold as a compelling witness to the abuse of power. In one story, a young man being beaten by authorities, already defeated, does not protest; in another, family members of an accused terrorist plead for his release, claiming a forced confession. As the intensely emotional and vivid narratives inside the gallery space are juxtaposed with the ambiguous
imagery of dark, moving figures behind the windows, blurred are the distinctions between “us” and “them,” between what is assumed and what is real.

Further exploring this duality, the artist will also create a commemorative space devoted to American victims and survivors of the war in Iraq. With these two powerful and vital bodies of work, Wodiczko continues the effort in breaking the codes of silence that prevent a society from progressing and a democracy from thriving.

Since Wodiczko’s last exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 2000, he has worked on a number of collaborative public projects and is a finalist in the design competition for a memorial of the victims of Flight 587 in New York. He participated in SlideShow, organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art; The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere at Mass MoCA; the first Yokahoma
Triennale; and Strangers, the first triennial of the International Center of Photography, New York. Major retrospectives will open this year at the Bunkier Sztuki Art Center in Krakow and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and public projections are planned for Kansas City, Basel, Stockholm, and Warsaw. Wodiczko will be featured in this season of the PBS series Art:21, which airs September 16, 23, 30, and October 7. He continues to serve as both director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the head of its Interrogative Design Group.

Galerie Lelong
528 West 26th Street - New York, NY 10001
Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm

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