MONIKA WEISS: Metamorphosis | Nirbhaya

Bruno David is pleased to present Metamorphosis | Nirbhaya, a video work by New York City and St. Louis-based artist Monika Weiss. This is her second solo exhibition with the gallery.

On view at Bruno David Gallery is the artist’s Metamorphosis | Nirbhaya (2021), a sound and film project to be viewed by one person at a time. For this cycle of films and sound compositions Monika Weiss choreographed and filmed women performers, guiding their slow movements of lamentation to evoke the story of Daphne, the mythological nymph who escaped violence by becoming a tree. This cycle of filmed sequences accompanied by a series of limited-edition color photography by the artist. To sonically evoke a state of transformation and transfiguration the artist composed the sound as based on the acoustic recordings of her own piano improvisations, merging, and transforming electronically her audio recordings into a new sonic spectrum. The sound part of this work is slated to open later this year as an outdoor ambisonic installation at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland where it will be a permanent part of the park and the museum’s collection.

Over the past twenty-five years, the internationally celebrated Polish American artist Monika Weiss has developed an aesthetic vocabulary of profound emotional impact that surpasses the limits of conventions around medium as it moves between the poetic and the political to propose affective ways of engaging with the body, history and violence. Her synesthetic art resists closure as it explores states of transformation and oscillates, as Mark McDonald (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) noted, “between proposal and presence, the allusive and the tangible”.

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 travelling 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. Recent publications on the artist’s work include Guy Brett’s The Crossing of Innumerable Paths: Essays on Art (2019). In 2016 Robert Storr invited the artist to participate in Fireflies in the Night Take Wing, an exhibition of video works by 50 international artists representing 29 countries, at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens.

Weiss’ first permanent outdoor project Nirbhaya, a monument to victims of gendered violence, is planned concurrently in her native Poland (2021) and in the United States (2022) and is accompanied by a recently published monograph Monika Weiss. Nirbhaya including main text by the acclaimed art historian Griselda Pollock and several other texts defining the artist’s oeuvre. As part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art series Artists on Artworks, a 30 min. film with Monika Weiss premiered on April 6, 2021, in which the artist shared her insights on the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya and reflected on her own transdisciplinary practice, which investigates relationships between the body and history and evokes rituals of lamentation in response to tragedy.

Monika Weiss a media artist based in New York City and St. Louis. She holds an appointment as Associate Professor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.