Screenings
November 14, 2022 at 6:00-8:00 PM ET at CUNY: Screening & Discussion with Krzysztof Wodiczko
The Skylight room (9100), The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Ave New York, NY 10016 RSVP
March 25, 2022 at 7:00 PM PT at Robert Brent Auditorium at Sebastopol Center for the Arts
Available March 28, 2022 at 12:00 AM PT-April 4 at 12:00 AM PT, 2022 Stream online
April 30, 2022 at 2:00 PM ET at the National Gallery of Art
as part of the Washington, DC International Film Festival.
In The Art of Un-War internationally acclaimed artist Krzysztof Wodiczko challenges our complacency towards war, xenophobia and displacement with his unique projections onto monuments and facades. The film, directed by Maria Niro, chronicles the life and political work of the Polish born artist, a pioneer of large scale projection art. Wodiczko’s lifelong investigation of monuments, war and trauma are intimately explored through his urban art interventions created over the past fifty years. Filmed with unprecedented access, this rare glimpse into the artist’s world stands as a permanent document of his thought-provoking and inspiring work.
Narrated by Krzysztof Wodiczko, and in conversations artist, activist Dread Scott, artist, writer, activist Gregory Sholette, media artist Ani Liu, artist Ewa Harabasz, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche, curator Bozena Czubak of Fundacja Profile, curator Micaela Martegani of More Art, and Mary Sabatino of Galerie Lelong & Co. Through colleagues and fellow artists activists, we come to know Wodiczko as an empathetic media artist with a deep commitment to exposing the travesties of war and its aftermath.
Krzysztof Wodiczko (born April 16, 1943) is a Polish artist known for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 90 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States
War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of his work. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.
Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents. Simultaneously, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments, vehicles and other cultural equipment with the homeless, immigrants, alienated youth, war veterans and other operators for their survival, communication and expression in public space.
He lives and works in New York City and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is currently professor in residence of art and the public domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as visiting professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.
Maria Niro is a New York City-based artist, and filmmaker. Her moving image work includes long-form documentaries and experimental shorts. “The Art of Un- War” is Niro’s debut feature-length documentary. The film chronicles the life and political work of the internationally acclaimed artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. To date, Niro completed over 41 short films with original sounds she’s created including video art shorts she created for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts website.
Niro’s films have screened and exhibited in galleries, museums, and in theaters worldwide including Queens Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art Gallery, Millennium Film Workshop, WNDX Festival in Canada, European Media Art Festival in Germany, Whitechapel Gallery UK, Berlin International Directors Lounge and Festival Internacional Del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano CUBA, among others. Her documentation of Abraham Lincoln War Veteran Projection screened at Harvard Art Museum, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, S.Korea, FACT Liverpool Biennial, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland and DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.
