Monika Weiss is a Polish-American contemporary artist based in New York City. Her works include video projections, photography, drawings, sound compositions, objects, and live and video performance, often combining these elements into large-scale installations and public projects.
Monika Weiss’s transdisciplinary work examines relationships between body and history and considers aspects of public memory. By enacting ancient gestures of lamentation, her work considers contemporary contexts of apathy, indifference, invisibility, and historical amnesia within the public forum.
Originally educated as a classical musician, Weiss records and composes sound in her cinematic works from testimonies, recitations, and musical instruments, including her own piano improvisations. Music, a principal element in her video works, merges diverse narratives together into polyphonic compositions and is also evoked in the rhythmic and poetic character of her drawings and photographs.
In 2005 Lehman College Art Gallery (City University of New York) organized the first retrospective of the artist’s work to date, Monika Weiss-Five Rivers, which was reviewed in The New York Times.
Recent and upcoming solo museum exhibitions include Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2010); Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile (2012-2013); and The Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum, FIU, Miami (2014).
Weiss’ works continue to be subject of noteworthy solo publications and monographs as well as international surveys including Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris, UK, 2007) and POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art (Real Art Ways, Harford).
The artist’s work is included in public collections worldwide, including CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and Frauenmuseum, Bonn.
Selected Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Weiss
http://www.artnet.com/artists/monika-weiss-2/
http://issuu.com/museomemoria/docs/issue_sustenazo/2?e=3536249/1039175
http://www.cifo.org/en/monica_weiss