Mechtild Widrich

Education: Mag.Phil., Art History Institute, University of Vienna; PhD, Department of Architecture, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2009. Awards: 2022-23 University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, Faculty Fellow; 2018 Literary Lions Award for Art Historical Research, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; 2018 Research Residency, University of Chicago Hong Kong Center; Writing Residency at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Postdoctoral Fellowship, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture; Curatorial Fellowship, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Charlotte Newcombe Pre-doctoral Fellowship in Ethics and Religion (decl.); Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Fulbright Scholarship; MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship. Concurrent Positions: 2022 (spring) Guest Professor, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; 2020- London Metropolitan University, Performance and Public Space program and research center, member of core research group; 2020- AgorAkademi, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris, member of core research group; 2019-22 Reviews Editor, Art Journal; Advisory Board Member, Život umjetnosti; Academic committee member, Vesper. Journal of Architecture, Arts and Theory. Board Member American Friends of the Vienna Museums; Advisory Board Member, Jewish Museum Vienna; Member of the Iconic Criticism Center (eikones), University of Basel; Founding Member, International Art and Architecture Network AAHA. 

I work on the intersection of contemporary art and architecture: I research and teach on art in public space and the question of the public sphere (in particular contemporary monuments), on performance art and its mediation, and on aesthetic theory. I am interested in the power and means of representation, in the broader institutional and political context of artistic production, in spatial dynamics and site-specificity, and in issues of "authentic" and "bodily" experience under mediated conditions. Another interest is theory, in particular beauty and ugliness.

Most Publications can be downloaded from her academia.edu page.

Books

• Monumental Cares. Sites of History and Contemporary Art. Manchester University Press, series: "Rethinking Art's Histories," winter 2023
• Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester University Press, series: "Rethinking Art's Histories," 2014
• Presence (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016, editor, with Philip Ursprung and Jürg Berthold, and contributor)
• Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Interaction and Occupation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), editor, with Martino Stierli, and contributor
• Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, editor, with Andrei Pop)
• Krzysztof Wodiczko, A 9/11 Memorial (London: Black Dog, 2009, editor, with Mark Jarzombek)
• Wien II. Leopoldstadt. Die andere Heimatkunde (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1999, editor, with Werner Hanak)

Texts in Scholarly Periodicals

• From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation, Art Margins Online (January 2022)
• “Monumentos, Experienca y Memoria,” Arcadia (September 2020)
• Future Anterior, Ex Situ. On Moving Monuments (vol. 15, no.2), co-editor and author “Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media”
• "The Naked Museum: Art, Urbanism, and Global Positioning in Singapore" (Art Journal, vol. 75, no. 2, summer 2016), 47–65
• "On finding objects and finding ourselves in space," Archplus (May 2016)
• "Babeltürme? Zeitgenössische Nationalgalerien als globale Stadtgeografien", Mitteilungen des österreichischen Kunsthistorikerverbandes (July 2015), 148–165
• "The Willed and the Unwilled Monument. Judenplatz Vienna and Riegl's Denkmalpflege," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), Vol. 72, No. 3 (Sept. 2013), 382–98
• "Spatial Implications of the Monument to Freedom and Unity in Leipzig," Log, No. 27 (Spring 2013), 81–6
• "The Informative Public of Performance: A Study of Viennese Actionism, 1965–1970," TDR. The Drama Review, No. 217 (February 2013), 137–51
• "Process and Authority: Marina Abramovi?'s Freeing the Horizon and Documentarity," Grey Room, No. 47 (May 2012), 80–97
• "Locations and Dislocations. VALIE EXPORT's Media Performances," PAJ. A Journal of Performance and Art, No. 99 (September 2011), 53–9

Book Chapters

•  “Selfies avec Ceaușescu. Sites, publics et médias dans l’art contemporain roumain," in Art, publics et cultures numériques: flux d’images et vie des œuvres (Art, Publics, Digital Cultures: Image Streams and the Lives of Artworks), University of Montreal Press
• “Sites, Selfies, and Contemporary Transnational Commemoration” in Nilüfer Göle (ed.), Public Space Democracy: Performative, Visual and Normative Dimensions of Politics in a Global Age (Routledge, Paris, 2022)
• "After the Countermonument: Commemoration in the Expanded Field", in Swati Chattopadhyay/ Jeremy White, The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (London/New York: Routledge, 2019)
• "Is Art in Public Space Public", City of Vienna Public Art Projects, (ed. City of Vienna).
• "'I'll be Your Mirror.' Transparency, Voyeurism and Glass Architecture," in Henriette Steiner, Kristin Veel (eds.), Negotiating (In)visibilities (Peter Lang, 2015)
• "Is the 'Re' in Reperformance the 'Re' in Reenactment?" in Carola Dertnig, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (eds.), Performing the Sentence. Mapping Research and Teaching in Times of Performative Fine Arts (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 138–47
• "Collecting 'History in the Making': The privatization of propaganda in National Socialist Cigarette cards," in Kevin Moist and David Banash (eds.), Collecting and Collections: Objects, Practices and the Fate of Things (Scarecrow Press, 2013), 151–72
• "Ge-Schichtete Präsenz und zeitgenössische Performance," in Uta Daur (ed.), Authentizität und Wiederholung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), 147–67
• "Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT'S Genital Panic since 1969," in Amelia Jones, Adrian Heathfield (eds.), Perform, Repeat, Record: A Critical Anthology of Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 89–103
• "Re-Performance: Da Capo oder Zugabe?" in Gabriele Mackert (ed.), Blind Date
• Zeitgenossenschaft als Herausforderung (Nürnberg: Institut für Moderne Kunst, 2008) (German), 128–39
• "Several Outbreaks of Valie Export's Genital Panic," in Hilde van Gelder and Helen Weestgeest (eds.), Photography between Poetics and Politics (Leuven: UP Leuven, 2008), 53–67

Translations

Translation of Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen [1853; Aesthetics of Ugliness] (under contract with Bloomsbury, London, 2015, paperback 2017, with Andrei Pop).

Texts in Exhibition Catalogues (selection)

• “Street Performances: Negotiating identity through Artistic Embodiments in Public Space”, Street Life, exhibition catalogue, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen (Germany), 2022
• “Desire”, The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media, 2022
• Corpus Callosum (in collaboration with A. Pop), in exhibition catalogue, Emilio Rojas. Tracing a Wound through my Body, Lafayette College, 2021
• “Once More, Never Again: Yael Bartana’s Orphan Carousel and Contemporary Commemoration”, in exhibition catalogue, Child Emigration / German Exile Archive, City of Frankfurt, 2021
• “Reenchanting the Art World? The Contemporary Ex-Voto”, in Ittai Weinryb (ed.) Agents of Faith (Yale University Press, 2018).
• "Das Haus denkt an die Gegenwart. Zum Erweiterungsbau des Kunstmuseums Basel von Christ&Gantenbein", in Das Kunstmuseum Basel (Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz, 2016), 108–15
• "The Fourth Wall Turns Pensive: Feminist Experiments with the Camera", In The Feminist Avantgarde, exh. Cat. Kunsthalle Hamburg, etc. (New York: Prestel, 2016)
• "Natur-Gewalt. Jonas Dahlbergs Entwurf für das 07/22 Mahnmal in Norwegen," Texte zur Kunst (September 2014), 266–269

Curatorial Work

• 2010 Co-Curator, there is nothing to see here, Modern Lab, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (with Arpi Kovacs and Akili Tommasino)
• 2007–08 Co-Curator, Sounding the Subject: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection and the New Art Trust, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (with Daniel Birnbaum)
• 2005 Co-Organizer, Spaces of the Cold War film series (MIT-Harvard University, with Olga Touloumi and Andrei Pop)
• 1997–2003 Commissioner for the county of Salzburg for the International Graphic Biennial Intergraf in Udine, Italy
• 1996 Co-Curator, Permanent Installation Remembrance by Nancy Spero, Jewish Museum Vienna (with Werner Hanak)

• Kelly Dolan (2021), “Objects in/of Queer Abstraction: The Transformation of Cassils’s Piss[ed]”
• Christine Stringer (2021), “Answering to Softness: Materiality, Place, and Conflict in Doris Salcedo's Sumando ausencias”
• Denis Mwaura (2021), “Mea(morial) Culpa: The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, Embodiment, and the Afterlife of Slavery”
• Martha Wilde (2021), “Defamiliarizing Home: Surrealism in the Art of Mona Hatoum”