Mechtild Widrich
Scholarship for artists, arts-based researchers, and curators at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz 2025
Mechtild Widrich is Professor and Department Chair in the Art History, Theory and Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She researches and writes on art in public space, performative and participatory practices, and the theory of the public sphere. Her most recent book Monumental Cares (Manchester University Press 2023) was a finalist for the best book of the art of the present (ASAP award) and rethinks monument debates, site specificity, and art activism. She has written extensively on VALIE EXPORT, e.g. Can Photographs Make it So? Several Outbreaks of EXPORT's Genital Panic. She studied at the University of Vienna and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD 2009) and has held guest professorships at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the University of Chicago.
Commemorative Prostheses: Memory, Mediation, and Material Culture
This project revisits VALIE EXPORT’s unrealized Holocaust memorial design Passage des Erinnerns, submitted for the Vienna Judenplatz competition ultimately won by Rachel Whiteread. EXPORT’s concept proposed a performative, embodied passage through memory: a tunnel with one wall of dark stone, the other of transparent glass, through which visitors became visible to onlookers, enacting remembrance in public space. A soundscape of Jewish history was to accompany each visitor’s journey. Situated above the site of a destroyed medieval synagogue, EXPORT’s design emphasized historical geography and layered mediation, including a visible excavation below a glass floor and flowing water that symbolically and visually distanced the past.
This performative use of media and embodiment invites comparison with EXPORT’s contemporaneous script Der virtuelle Körper. Vom Prothesenkörper zum postbiologischen Körper (1993), a meditation on technologically extended bodies and cyberfeminist thought. By placing these two works in dialogue, the project examines how EXPORT’s engagement with memory, bodily presence, and media transparency aligns with the cultural conditions of the 1990s “memory boom”—a period marked by intensified reflection on history and its representation. EXPORT’s work at the time offers a unique lens on how mediated and corporeal forms of remembrance intersected at a moment when both were being radically reimagined.
