258. Monika Weiss: Multimedia Artist

Arts Interview with Nancy Kranzberg

Monika Weiss, who is an internationally known multimedia artist, stopped by to talk with Nancy about her work and her life.

Monika Weiss Artist portrait, 2019. still from video interview: Adam Hogan and Laura Stayton

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, thier 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.

Monika Weiss Studio, 2019. artist filming and choreographing a performer (right) in real time.

Photo: Adam Hogan and Laura Stayton. performer: Melissa Gollance

Stills taken of the Monika Weiss exhibition Sustenazo.