Monika Weiss | |
|---|---|
 Weiss in Speaking Portraits | |
| Born | 1964 |
| Nationality | Polish-American |
| Known for | Installation, Video, Performance |
| Website | www |
Monika Weiss (born 1964, in Warsaw) is a Polish-American contemporary artist based in New York City. She works primarily with Installation, video projection, performance, sound and drawing. [1] [2] Her transdisciplinary approach investigates relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation. [3] [4]
Weiss, the daughter of a concert pianist, studied piano and classical music from 1970-1984. [1] [5] She attended The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1984-1989, where she studied painting and drawing under Ryszard Winiarski, Stefan Gierowski and Marian Czapla. She was an Artist in Residence at The Academy of Fine Arts In Łódź (1994-1995), Spelman College in Atlanta (1996), the Georgia State University School of Art and Design (1997-1998), The University of Maryland (1999) and at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2002). [1]
Weiss's early works from the 1980s and early 90s consisted mostly of drawings and paintings of human figures. The drawings were made with ink mixed with paint and she often built collages on large sheets of paper from them. Later the artist's work expanded to include installations, video and sound projects. [1]
Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions internationally. [1] [6] In 2005, Lehman College Art Gallery organized and published a retrospective of the artist's work since 1999, Monika Weiss: Five Rivers. [1] [6] [7] In 2006, Weiss was commissioned to create Drawing Lethe at the World Financial Center, a large scale public project curated by the Drawing Center in New York. [1] [4] [8] Her work has been featured at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami (Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art, 2007; The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, 2009), [9] [10] and she was part of Prague's Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo)’s inaugural show in 2010. [4] [11]
Some other notable exhibitions include Moment by Moment: Meditations of the Hand at North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2006); On the Absence of Camps at Kunsthaus Dresden (2006); POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art at Real Art Ways, Hartford (2008); and Frauen bei Olympia at Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2009). [4] Weiss has exhibited alongside and collaborated with artists such as Carolee Schneemann, [12] Mona Hatoum, Francis Alys, [6] and Stephen Vitiello among others. [13]
Weiss has given lectures on her work at institutions around the world and her writings have appeared in numerous publications, including New Realities: Being Syncretic (Springer, Wien/New York) and Technoetic Arts (Intellect, London). [3] [14]
In 2009 she received the New York Foundation for the Arts award in the interdisciplinary art category. [1] She splits her time between New York and St. Louis, where she is an associate professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and faculty affiliate in the Performing Arts Department. [3]
A recurring motif in the artist’s work is the exploration of the ancient ritual of lament. [1] [3] [14] Group mourning, she states, is more than a response to a specific grief; it can act as a political force. Historically a feminine expression, lamentation stands "in opposition to heroic, masculine fantasies of conquest and power." [5] Through lamentation she draws attention to the complexities of history, incorporating "those who have been perennially absent: the victims and the defeated." [15] According to art critic Adriana Valdes, lamentation is both an expression and a silence; it lacks articulation. [15] Weiss's work focuses on this lack of articulation, "the moment when language collapses in face of the loss of the ability to signify." [5]
Weiss uses her body as an artistic tool, [7] as a vehicle and a palette. [16] Often she employs her body in repetitive and monotonous movements within specific limitations, such as submerging herself at long lengths in a concrete receptacle filled with water (Ennoia) or by rolling around, tracing her silhouette on materials such as sheets of canvas (Leukos) or a bed of books (Phlegethon-Milczenie). [1] [2] [7]
Her performances lack dramaturgical plot. [2] They are noted for their syncopated rhythms, which serve to “both disrupt and, paradoxically, prolong time.” [16] She “provides an alternative experience of space and time, which is not end-driven but steady and enduring.” [17]
Drawing has been described as the touchstone of her art. [16] It often ties together the various aspects of her art, the technological with the corporeal, the communal with the solitary. [17]
Enacted in 2002 at the Diapason Gallery in New York, the installation involved the artist immersing herself in a concrete basin full of water, emerging only periodically throughout the 6-hour duration of the performance. [16] A camera suspended from the ceiling recorded the performance and the image of her submerged, curled up body was projected on a nearby wall, accompanied by sounds from below the surface of the water. [1] [16] As described by critic James D. Campbell, “The artist seemed to meld her own body to the contours of the water-filled sculpted basin in which it was submersed as though it were a secondary skin; a shell-like armature for her vulnerable body, providing protection. Like an embryo in vitro, the font was interpretable as exoskeleton containing a nourishing vat of amniotic fluid, replete with the waters of her life.” [16]
“Leukos” was an outdoor performance installation created on the grounds of Lehman College in the Bronx. It was part of a series of works titled “Intervals,” in which drawings were made by the artist and other participants by tracing their bodies. [7] Over the course of two days the artist and other contributors rolled around on large sheets of cotton, for several hours at a time, tracing their silhouettes with crayons, graphite, and pigments, while wind and rain darkened and blurred the drawings. [7] [18] The cotton canvas was then installed in the gallery with a video of the performance projected on the wall behind it, accompanied by a soundtrack of opera arias. [18] The New York Times wrote of the piece: “Partly, the work helps make us look at and think differently about the body, as an inert object, and partly it is all about collapsing together artistic genres - sculpture, installation, performance and drawing - in a way so wayward as to almost obviate art altogether.” [7]
For this installation in Potsdam, books - philosophical and literary publications from pre-war Germany – served as objects on which the artist crawled and drew, outlining her body while her eyes remained shut. In an adjacent room a continuous video was projected, based on the performance. [17] In a review for The Gazette (Montreal) , Henry Lehmann wrote, “Something that happens in Weiss's work, in what seems an objective manner, is that at some point the books quit being just books and become primarily art forms. They no longer ask to be read, but ask rather that we bear witness to their existence and perhaps see their yellowing pages as measures of time.” [19]
First installed in the cellars of the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the multi-media installation was inspired by an event that took place at the castle shortly after the onset of the Warsaw Uprising. In August 1944, the occupying German army ordered an immediate evacuation of nearly two thousand hospital patients. Many of the seriously ill patients died shortly thereafter. [6] [20] [21] Weiss used original documents related to the hospital's evacuation along with other images and sounds. In the video, voices in Polish are broken up, overlaid with voices in German. An eighty-year-old Polish woman, who was a young nurse at the hospital, tells the story of her experience in Polish while another woman's voice reads passages in German from Faust II. [20] The title, Sustenazo, is a Greek word, meaning “to sigh, to lament inaudibly together.” [6] In her own words, “The act of ‘throwing out’ a hospital contradicts everything a hospital ought to be: a place where human lives are saved. Sustenazo evokes that event as a metaphor for war in general.” [5]
The artist does not perform in Sustenazo and has not performed in other recent works as to avoid autobiographical interpretations. She also stresses that it is not solely about Polish or European history either. She explains, “It is more broadly about the loss of lives inflicted by war and by other political and organized acts of violence and oppression. For me, war is not only devastating: it is unacceptable.” [5] Beginning in December 2012 one of the three videos from the exhibition, Sustenazo (Lament II), is being exhibited at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile in a solo exhibition that includes an installation from antique books, medical instruments and artist's drawings. An accompanying catalogue of essays and interviews, Monika Weiss: Sustenazo (Lament II), was published in conjunction with the show. [22]
Katarzyna Kozyra is a Polish video artist. She studied German studies at the University of Warsaw (1985–1988). In 1993, she also graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where she studied sculpture and Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Kozryra received a Paszport Polityki award in 1997 as the most promising artist in Poland. She has exhibited internationally since 1997, at venues including Brown University and Carnegie International in the U.S.
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.
Orshi Drozdik is a feminist visual artist based in New York City. Her work consists of drawings, paintings, photographs, etchings, performances, videos, sculptures, installations, academic writings and fiction, that explore connected themes, sometimes over an extended period. Through her work, organized into several topics, she explores themes that undermine the traditional and erotic representation of women: Individual Mythologies,Adventure in Tecnos Dystopium, and Manufacturing the Self. She is influenced by Valéria Dienes, János Zsilka, Susan Sontag, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luce Irigaray, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, among others. Her working method: critical analysis of meaning, influenced her contemporaries, her students and later generations of women artists. The art historian László Beke noted in an interview realized by Kata Krasznahorkai in 2017 that "Orsolya Drozdik is the first feminist artist in Hungary".
Minnette Vári is a South African artist known primarily for her video installations. Born in Pretoria, Vári studied fine arts at the University of Pretoria where she obtained her master's degree. She lives and works in Johannesburg.
Dannielle Tegeder is a contemporary artist who works with installation, animation and sound and is best known for her abstract paintings and drawings. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Times Square, Manhattan.
Nene Humphrey is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been compared to that of Kiki Smith, Janine Antoni, Petah Coyne, and Louise Bourgeois. She has lived and worked in New York since 1978. Humphrey’s work explores the body, loss, the neuroscience of emotion, and the beauty inherent in both. The integration of art and science is fundamental to Humphrey’s art practice, which often takes the form of iterative research-based projects.
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile.
Monika Bravo is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia, who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work has been internationally exhibited, including at Stenersen Museum in Oslo; Seoul's International Biennial of New Media Art; Bank of the Republic in Bogotá; New Museum and El Museo del Barrio in New York City and Site Santa Fe. Her work has received acclaim including a 1999 New York Times review which called her piece Synchronicity a "standout...small, beautifully blurry video images of boats plowing through New York Harbor..."
Leandro Soto was a Cuban-American multidisciplinary visual/installation and performance artist. He was also a set and costume designer for theater and film. Soto studied at Escuela Nacional de Arte National Art Schools (Cuba) and Instituto Superior de Arte, University of Havana. As an educator he taught and lectured at various Higher Education institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Soto also founded a creative workshop, El Tesoro de Tamulte, in Tabasco, Mexico, from which professional artists emerged.
Nan Hoover was a Dutch/American-expatriate artist who is known for her pioneering work in video art, photography and performance art. She spent almost four decades living and working in the Netherlands. She also used the mediums of drawing, painting, photography and film and created art objects and sculptures. One of the main themes of her art was light and motion. The rigorous, minimalist handling of her means as well as the intense concentration with which she performed within spaces of light and shadow are the most salient characteristics of her artistic work.
Amalia Pica is a London-based Argentinian artist who explores metaphor, communication, and civic participation through sculptures, installations, photographs, projections, live performances, and drawings.
Johanna Calle is an artist born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1965. She is based in Bogotá.
Ella Fontanals-Cisneros is a Cuban-born philanthropist and art collector with an abiding passion, and discerning eye for contemporary art and design. Born in Cuba and raised in Venezuela, her vision has made a significant impact on the Miami arts community and arts organizations around the globe. She is the founder and honorary president of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO).
Sabine Hornig is a German visual artist and photographer who lives and works in Berlin. Her work in photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation art is known for her interpretations of modernist architecture and contemporary urban life. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions throughout the world, including Double Transparency at Art Unlimited Basel in Switzerland (2014) and Projects 78 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003), and in numerous group exhibitions at institutions like the J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and ICA London.
Meg Webster is an American artist from San Francisco working primarily in sculpture and installation art. While her works span multiple media, she is most well known for her artworks that feature natural elements. She is closely affiliated with Post-Minimalism and the Land Art movement and has been exhibiting her work since 1980.
María Evelia Marmolejo is a Colombian radical feminist performance artist, later based in Madrid and New York City. She is credited by the Colombian scholar María Lovino with staging the first work of feminist performance art in Colombia, in 1981. She is best known for discussing controversial themes such as political oppression, feminism, environment, and socioeconomic issues within her performances.
Elena Asins was a prominent visual artist, writer, lecturer and critic. Her plastic language was based on computer systematic calculation. Asins pioneered the convergence between theoretical computer science and the minimal and geometrical tendencies of the 1960s. She belongs to the first generation of artists using computers to generate art.
Dolores "Loló" Soldevilla Nieto (1901–1971) was a Cuban visual artist primarily known for her role in concrete art.
Suwon Lee is a Korean-Venezuelan artist based in Madrid, Spain.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
