Organized by the Department
of Art History in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Please register
beforehand at:
sarah.lauss@uni-ak.ac.at.
Monumental
Cares (Manchester University Press, 2023) considers the monument debates of the past decade together in light of phenomena
that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as climate crisis, migration, and local and global political tensions.
How can a date or event be made to stand for, much less represent, such processes? We have to start from the ground up, Widrich
argues, paying attention to how sites, as well as artifacts and the audiences that inhabit them operate on multiple, overlapping
levels of mediation. A multidirectional theory of site brings together objects, their photographic reproduction, and a geographically
informed sense of audience(s) – local, regional, global. Attending to history and practice in this site-directed way, helps
us see the significance of history to the fashioning of a working, democratic public sphere.
Mechtild
Widrich is Professor in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently Faculty
Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Advanced Study. She was a Guest Professor at the University of Applied
Arts in 2022, and part of the expert committee for the competition to recontextualize the Karl Lueger statue in Vienna. Widrich
researches and writes on art in public space, in particular monuments and monument activism, performative and participatory
practices, the theory of the public sphere, as well as aesthetic theory. Widrich has won numerous awards and fellowships,
e.g. from the Fulbright Foundation, the Max-Planck-Institute Berlin, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the Newcombe Fellowship,
Schlossman Prize, and the Swiss National Science Foundation and is member of AgorAkademi (École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales Paris), the Performance and Public Space research center (London Metropolitan University), as well as a member of
the grant part committee on art, monuments and markers in Chicago.
Widrich is the author of Performative
Monuments (2014) and Monumental Cares (2023), both with Manchester University Press. She is the (co)editor
of Future Anterior, special issue Ex Situ: On Moving Monuments (2020); Participation in Art and Architecture
(2015, paperback 2022); Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2013, paperback 2015), Krzysztof Wodiczko,
A 9/11 Memorial (2009); and translator (with Andrei Pop) of Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen [1853;
Aesthetics of Ugliness] (2015, paperback 2017).
Her writings have appeared in Art
Journal, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, ArtMargins, Log, TDR, JSAH, and numerous books and catalogues in Europe and the
US, most recently in Street Life (Wilhelm Hack Museum, 2022) and Public Matters (Austrian Gallery Belvedere,
2023).
