Krysztof Wodiczko
MONUMENT THERAPY
19 November 2005 - 22 January 2006
Zacheta National Gallery of Art
Pl. Malachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw, Poland
phone ( 48 22) 827 58 54
press [at] zacheta.art.pl
Zacheta National Gallery of Art, The projection of Krzysztof Wodiczko, 14th of November 2005, photo S. Madejski.
The opening of the Zacheta exhibition was preceded by a projection on its facade whose subject was the problems of women victims of violence in contemporary Poland. The voice of women from large cities and small towns alike resounded loudly in the centre of Warsaw, near the institutions and ministries responsible for the laws and their application. ARTIBUS, the inscription on the Zachetas pilaster-supported architrave, dedicating the building to the arts, took on new meaning as a result of the projection. As the artist noted, It may mean not only an encouragement to develop arts and skills, but also an encouragement to fight for equal access to those arts and skills. An encouragement for art to speak out on the fundamental existential, social, and political issues. An encouragement to fight for your human and civic rights. A film documentary of the event will be showing in the Zacheta Gallery beginning in 29th of November.
Monument Therapy is a monographic exhibition of the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, recognized as one of the most significant of Polish artists, and living in New York since the 1980s. His art has confronted the genre known as public art for which public space is both site and stake. Monument Therapy a term first used by the artist in the title of a lecture given at the University of Michigan combines two notions central to his art: the memorial (monument, memory) and therapy (the process of healing, participation).
The Zacheta exhibition presents one portion of Wodiczkos work, the so-called Instruments, confronted with film recordings of his monumental architectural Projections. The exhibitions narrative begins with the first of the Instrument series the Personal Instrument, whose user was the artist himself. Its public presentation in 1969 near the tunnel of Warsaws main east-west thoroughfare, the Trasa W-Z, was, according to the artist, a public monument of a private individual in a monumental public space. In another accompanying event, the Personal Instrument, now in the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, was revived, reactivated, and re-deployed prior to the exhibition, this time by persons other than the artist himself. A film documenting this event made by Jozef Robakowski is presented alongside the work itself. The subsequent Xenological Instruments (from Greek xenos, alien) the Alien Staff, Mouthpiece, Aegis, and Dis-armor are objects constructed by an artist who has remained faithful to his choice of public space as his sphere of action. But rather than focusing on himself, he has made others immigrants, foreigners, survivors of tragedy, trauma, and shock into co-artists, participants or even the main protagonists of his actions.
Film documentations of all Wodiczkos monumental public video projections are also available for the public at the exhibition in Zacheta Gallery.
Curator for the Zacheta: Hanna Wroblewska Collaboration and production: Anna Muszynska Co-ordinator of the projection on the facade of the Zacheta: Lidia Ostalowska Recording and projection for the Zacheta: EBH Polska Film editing for the Zacheta projection: Mirek Szewczyk
Films documenting the Tijuana, Boston, Hiroshima, St. Louis, and Cracow projections produced by Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow
sponsors of the exhibition: American Embassy in Poland, BenQ sponsors of the gallery: Lidex, Peri, Netia official carrier: .PLL LOT sponsors of the opening ceremony: A. Blikle, Freixenet media patronage: Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Polskie Radio, Polityka, The Warsaw Voice, Onet.pl, Tygodnik Powszechny, Recykling Idei, EMPiK
