The Vienna Project

Project Timeline

Karen Frostig, artist, writer, professor and granddaughter of Austrian Holocaust victims is Founding President of a new memorial project The Vienna Project. The memorial will open along the Danube Canal on October 24, 2013 and unfold over the next six months as a series of public installations, closing on May 8th, 2014 in the Augarten. The Vienna Project is a new holocaust memory project, which embodies art, technology, history and education.

Its honorary board includes Nobel Prize laureates Elie Wiesel and Walter Kohn, who were also survivors of the Holocaust, Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues under the Clinton Administration, Wolfgang M. Paul, former Austrian Ambassador to Israel, the President of Bard College Leon Botstein, and Harvard University Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Herbert C. Kelman.

 Project partners include The Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), The Jewish Welcome Service, The University of Applied Arts, the Wien Museum, the Jewish Museum Vienna, and the Wiesenthal Institute. The project axiom “What happens when we forget to remember?” delivers a fresh message about history, while making memory visible on the streets of Vienna. Developed as a participatory and generative model of collective remembrance, the memorial contains three focal points: 1) Opening ceremonies developed as bridge and water projections, 2) sidewalk installation program featuring 38 addresses where crimes against citizens took place, and 3) closing ceremony featuring the names of 90,000+ Austrian victims and dissidents projected onto the surface of the Flaktower (anti-aircraft towers built by the Nazis to shoot down allied bombers) in the Augarten.

The Vienna Project, will be the first public memorial in Europe to commemorate multiple victim and dissident groups, on record within a given country, murdered between 1938-1945. On October 24th, 2013 water and bridge projections are taking place at the Danube Canal. In addition, the closing ceremony will be held at the Augarten on May 6-8, 2014. The closing event will be comprised of video and sound installations.

For additional information visit: http://theviennaproject.org/