Projected Guests: MIT Art at the Venice Biennial

An MIT artist known for his large, politically charged slide and video projections is representing his home country, Poland, at the 53rd Venice Art Biennale, which opened this week. Krzysztof Wodiczko, professor in the MIT Visual Arts Program, is showing "Goscie / Guests" in the Polish Pavilion.

In very MIT fashion, Wodiczko is using high-definition, large-scale images to give a voice to immigrants from Chechnya, Ukraine, Libya, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Morocco who seek work in Europe. His earlier work allowed grieving mothers to speak of murdered children from the surface of Boston's Bunker Hill Monument, Mexican factory girls to tell their stories from a Tijuana building, and atomic bomb survivors to talk from the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima.

Wodiczko is not the only member of the visual arts faculty at the world's most prestigious art biennial. Video/performance art pioneer Joan Jonas, professor of visual arts, is there presenting "Reading Dante II," two projections suggested by "The Divine Comedy." One is a 40-minute poetic narrative and video; the other, chalk drawing shapes and forms projected onto a blackboard.