Monika Weiss

Phlegethon-Milczenie. Self-shot photography, performance, books, projected video, sound. Collection: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami. 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. Her transdisciplinary approach investigates relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation.

Education Weiss, the daughter of a concert pianist, studied piano and classical music from 1970-1984. 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). In 2005, Lehman College Art Gallery organized and published a retrospective of the artist's work since 1999, Monika Weiss: Five Rivers. 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. 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), and she was part of Prague's Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo)’s inaugural show in 2010.

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). Mona Hatoum, Francis Alys,

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).

In 2009 she received the New York Foundation for the Arts award in the interdisciplinary art category. According to art critic Adriana Valdes, lamentation is both an expression and a silence; it lacks articulation. 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).

Drawing Drawing has been described as the touchstone of her art. 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.

Sustenazo

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. 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.