Professor Ken Wilder is an academic, artist and writer. He is the University of the Arts Professor of Aesthetics, and the Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Design, based at Chelsea/Camberwell College[s] 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. 

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Wilder is Principal Investigator on the groundbreaking AHRC funded research project Beyond the Visual, which received the inaugural AHRC Exhibition Fund. Along with Co-Investigator Dr Aaron McPeake, he has been working closely with Dr Clare O'Dowd, the Research Curator at our project partner Henry Moore Institute, and project partner Shape Arts. The project culminates in the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition ⎼ held at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds ⎼ in which blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process and make up the majority of participating artists. The exhibition runs from 28 November 2025 to 19 April 2026. It is co-curated by O'Dowd, Wilder and McPeake.

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https://henry-moore.org/whats-on/beyond-the-visual/

The exhibition has received significant press coverage, including: Radio 4 Front Row, The Guardian, The Observer, Frieze, Studio International, Art Quarterly, The Art Newspaper, Disability Arts Online. Writing inThe Observer, Laura Cumming calls the exhibition 'revelatory ⎼ and revolutionary', stating that 'Beyond the Visual actively alters one’s experience of art, taking it beyond the dominance of sight'. Anna McNay, in Studio International, says that the 'exhibition turns the way we think about sculpture on its head'. Ellen Mara de Wachter, in Frieze, writes: 'Informed by decades of disability activism, the work of academics in critical blindness studies and crip theory, as well as artists developing new forms, the exhibition highlights how blind creators harness the perceptual and imaginative qualities of their blindness to expand registers of art in exciting new ways'. Accompanying the exhibition is a 23 chapter volume, Beyond the Visual: multisensory modes of beholding art, edited by Wilder and McPeake, and published by UCL Press.

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https://uclpress.co.uk/book/beyond-the-visual/

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In addition to his most recent writing on blindness arts, 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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Wilder has had articles published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Aesthetic Investigations, 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).