Cover image © ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images

Dr Ken Wilder is an academic, artist and writer. He is the University of the Arts London Reader in Spatial Design, based at Chelsea College of Arts and Camberwell College of Arts. 

Wilder makes site-responsive sculptural installations, sometimes including video projection. He has exhibited widely in the UK, and also exhibited in Germany, Lithuania, Ukraine, Sweden and China. He is artist-in-residence for Coram, the leading children’s charity; in 2016, he installed Skylights, a site-specific installation within the London Foundling mortuary, Bloomsbury. 

Wilder has written extensively on the aesthetics of reception. His monograph Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception was published in May 2020 by Bloomsbury. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially-situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder’s orientation into play. This engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs. 

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Stephen Farthing RA, artist and Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, writes of Beholding that it is:

A beautifully-written interdisciplinary book that acknowledges the permeability of the once strong divisions that separated art, architecture, the cinema and design. Artist and theorist Ken Wilder explains, through his theory of beholding, how the audience’s viewing conditions can shape their understanding of an art work.

Wilder has had articles published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Estetika: The Central European Journal for Aesthetics, Architecture and Culture, Theatre and Performance Design, Image [&] Narrative, and Filmwaves. He has written a chapter on the Free Art Collective, published in Manifesto Now! (London: Intellect, 2013), and a chapter, ‘The Configurational Encounter and the Problematic of Beholding’, in Malcolm Quinn (ed.) The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). The artist's current research continues to focus on the phenomenological experience of art, but extends this beyond the visual (in collaboration with Dr Aaron McPeake). This questions how a shift in the aesthetic engagement afforded by hybrid (intermedia) forms of contemporary art potentially opens up new engagements for the partially sighted and blind community.