The International Peace Festival | Festival International de la Paix (IPF| FIP) is pleased to announce internationally-renowned artist and ACT Professor Emeritus Krzysztof Wodiczko as the 2024 recipient of the IPF | FIP Honorary Artistic Award to be formally presented to Mr. Wodiczko at a special awards ceremony on September 28, 2024 at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, Canada.
The IPF | FIP Honorary Artistic Award recognizes the specific nature of cultural and artistic work and the uniqueness of cultural and natural heritage conservation, protection and promotion as a critical contributor to peace. The award honors Mr. Wodiczko for his contribution as an artist to world peace and to the use of urban space as a communicative environment. His vast visual repertoire not only seeks to heal social wounds but perhaps more importantly calls attention to them.
Mr. Wodiczko was born in Warsaw, Poland. He received his PhD in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, and is a former director of Interrogative Design Group at MIT, and presently a professor emeritus of Art, Design and the Public Domain at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is renowned for his large-scale projections on architectural facades, and monuments. He has realized over ninety of such projections in twenty countries.
His work was presented at Documenta, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Montreal Biennale, Yokohama Triennial and many other international art exhibitions and festivals. He is a recipient of 4th Hiroshima Art Prize “for his contribution as an artist to the world peace”. He has held retrospective exhibitions at Walker Art Center, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, and other museums and art centers.
Mr. Wodiczko is also an author of Critical Vehicles (MIT Press), City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, The Abolition of War, The Transformative Avant-Garde, and other books including a large monograph Krzysztof Wodiczko, published by Black Dog Press, London. His work is presented in PBS television series Art in the Twenty-First Century. The documentary film Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Art of Un-War, directed by Maria Niro, was also released in 2022.
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. Through his projections and communicative instruments, he gives public voice and expression to the rights of marginalized city residents.
As Mr. Wodiczko explained in his own words: “It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?”
The International Peace Festival | Festival International de la Paix praises Mr. Wodiczko’s innovative artistic approach and dedication in immersing artistic expression into contemporary reality. His work exemplifies the type of artistic practice and transformation this award aims to recognize each year. This award is not just a personal achievement for Mr. Wodiczko but also a milestone in the recognition of art as an instrument of peace amid the flames of war.
