With Mechtild Widrich’s appointment as visiting professor to the class
Site-Specific Art (Paul Petritsch) for the summer semester 2022 to teach the course ‘Monumental Cares’, the University of
Applied Arts Vienna offers a specific content as a contribution to the discourse about the political monument on a regional
and international level.
Mechtild Widrich is an expert in contemporary monuments
and participatory artistic practice in public space. Widrich is the author of numerous publications, e.g. the books Performative
Monuments (Manchester, 2014), Monumental Cares (Manchester, 2022), Participation in Art and Architecture (London, 2015/22),
Krzysztof Wodiczko, A 9/11 Memorial (London, 2009) and frequently writes for international journals, magazines and newspapers.
Widrich
is a professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, currently
Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts, and 2022/23 Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University
of Notre Dame. She holds a MPhil from the University of Vienna’s Art History Department and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Architecture Department.
Widrich is core research member of the AgorAkademi project
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris, the Performance and Public Space program and Research Center at
London Metropolitan University and part of the Grant Park Advisory Council on Art, Monuments, Markers in Chicago. Her research
has been supported by the University of Chicago Hong Kong Center, the CCA/ Nanyang Technical University Singapore, the Eikones
Center at University of Basel, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, ETH Zurich, and the Academic Society
Basel among others.
