Monika Weiss

In a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses video, film, performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, the Polish American artist Monika Weiss moves between the political and the poetic to explore questions of the body, history, and gendered violence. Her work is intimately engaged with processes of witnessing and remembering as it attends to traumatic histories, their transmission, and commemoration. Weiss frequently employs her own body to navigate the aftermath of different traumas, raising questions of how one can articulate these without enacting further violence. The female body does not only become a vehicle of expression, but also forms a key site from which an affective politics may emerge, through touch, vulnerability, and the visceral. Her mixed-media, embodied practice foregrounds sensing as a modality through which we can develop an ethics and politics of remembrance and of being together in the world, simultaneously challenging modernist assumptions concerning a duality of mind and body. By frequently attending to events and histories that she has not personally witnessed, Weiss fleshes out the multidirectional character of memory and seeks to forge new solidarities that exceed national boundaries.

Weiss’ practice engages with the body as a sensory and psychic site, mapping its relationship to space, time and history. Her early mixed-media works “Ennoia” (2002) and “Elytron (dusza i ciało to tylko dwa skrzydła)” (2003) included multi-hour-long performances in which the artist inhabited an octagonal vessel resembling a baptismal font, filled with water or black ink. Drawing on the duration and solemnity of ritual, Weiss’ works frequently explore symbolic acts of initiation, rebirth, or cleansing. Weiss pairs her exploration of the physical body with an inquiry into its visual representation and material trace, which allows her to move seamlessly between drawing, performance, video, and sound. In “Drawing Lethe” (2006), a work commissioned by The Drawing Center, New York, Weiss referred to the physicality of drawing as she made charcoal marks around her prostrate body, moving silently within the boundaries of a large cotton canvas spanned on the floor of the World Financial Center Winter Garden. Taking place in the vicinity of Ground Zero where workers were still searching for remains, Weiss, joined by passersby, mapped a wounded site within the body of the city, suggesting affective ways of working through loss.

Public projects that take the form of ephemeral and site-specific environments constitute an important strand in Weiss’ practice. In “Shrouds-Całuny” (2012), Weiss filmed, from an airplane, local women performing silent gestures of lamentation on the abandoned, forgotten site of the former concentration camp Grünberg, Germany, which is now Zielona Góra, Poland. Weiss’ exploration of public memory and cultural amnesia is underscored by her focus on the vulnerability of the female body in the context of the city, such as in her recent film Wrath (2015) and her series of 19 films, “Two Laments” (2015-2020). Trained both as a pianist and a visual artist, Weiss composes the sound that constitutes many of her works, considering the vocal-musical-poetic form of lament as a modality of collective resistance and remembrance. Her first permanent outdoor project “Nirbhaya,” a monument to victims of gendered violence named after Jyoti Singh, aka Nirbhaya (“fearless”), who was raped and killed at the age of 23 in New Delhi in 2012, is planned concurrently in her native Poland (2021) and in the U.S. (2022).

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Monika Weiss arrived in New York City in 2001 as a long-term artist-in-residence at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Since 2011, she divides her time between her studio in New York and her appointment as associate professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She has been awarded numerous grants and residency fellowships, including those from BRIC, Harvestworks, U.S. Embassy in Poland, New York Foundation for the Arts, and YADDO. Recent publications about the artist’s work include a chapter in Guy Brett’s “The Crossing of Innumerable Paths: Essays on Art” (London: Ridinghouse, 2019) and a forthcoming bilingual monograph “Monika Weiss – Nirbhaya” published by the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko/National Institution of Culture, with texts by Griselda Pollock (Leeds University) and Mark McDonald (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), among others.

Weiss’ solo museum exhibitions include the 2005 retrospective at the Lehman College Art Gallery (CUNY) “Five Rivers,” reviewed in The New York Times, as well as Sustenazo, commissioned by the CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw, Poland (2010), later traveling to the Museum of Memory & Human Rights, Santiago, Chile (2012-2013) and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami (2014). In 2004 Remy Toledo Gallery, New York, in cooperation with Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, organized a two-person exhibition of Carolee Schneemann and Monika Weiss. The artist’s works have been shown alongside artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Mona Hatoum, and Shirin Neshat. Weiss’ work was featured in group exhibitions and related publications at Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, Greece (international video art survey directed by Robert Storr, 2016); Eyebeam, New York (with Alan Sondheim, 2012), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation/CIFO, Miami (“Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art,” 2006; “The Prisoner’s Dilemma(,” 2008), “Drawing Now: Between The Lines of Contemporary Art,” Loughborough University, UK, and was part of Prague’s Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo)’s inaugural show in 2010. Her works are included in public and private collections worldwide, including Albertina Museum, Vienna, AU; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation/CIFO, Miami, FL; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; Frauenmuseum, Bonn, DE; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, PL; and Dimas de Melo Pimenta’s collection, Locarno, SW.

—Dr. Katarzyna Falęcka, Berlin, September 2020