Link to Recording of Panel 4: https://www.monikaweiss.net/monumentantimonument

Monument | Anti-Monument

Creative Exchange Lab | Center for Architecture & Design STL (CEL), proudly announces a program of six virtual, international panel discussions collectively titled Monument | Anti-Monument. Moderated by Rick Bell, the program takes placein conjunction  with two concurrent solo exhibitions: Monika Weiss – Monument | Anti-Monument (March 31^st – April 22^nd, 2021) at CEL, and Monika Weiss: Nirbhaya (March 27^th – May 22^nd, 2021) at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, a National Heritage Institution of Poland. Inspired by the work of the internationally celebrated Polish-American artist Monika Weiss and her paradigm-shifting monument/anti-monument project Nirbhaya the panels bring together artists, architects, activists, and historians to debate the role of monuments and commemorative design in shaping cultural identity.

The work of Monika Weiss is predicated on the act of unforgetting past traumas. It has particular resonance at this time when we rethink our histories and ways of  remembering. In Nirbhaya, a memorial dedicated to victims of everyday violence that occurs globally, and named after Jyoti Singh, who was tortured, raped and killed at the age of 23 (posthumously named Nirbhaya, “Fearless” in Hindi) the artist transforms the traditional vertical form of a triumphal arch into a horizontal sarcophagus filled with water and moving image. This forthcoming permanent outdoor memorial by Monika Weiss will be built as two sister monuments, in Poland and in the US. Polish location is in the public park of the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. US location is co-organized in collaboration with Streaming Museum. The six panel discussions are scheduled bi-weekly on  Fridays: March 12, March 26, April 9, April 23, May 7 and May 21. All panels take place at 12 Noon (CST), 1PM (EST), 20:00 (GMT), 21:00 (GMT+1).

Panel 4 | Friday, April 23

The Architecture of Memory, Gender & Intersectionality

Inspired by Monika Weiss’ Nirbhaya, Panel 4 brings attention to collective memory as a symbolic and actual site where architecture, voice and the performativity of gender coexist as forms of intersectionality. In recent times the concept of and prejudice against ‘gender’ understood as social construct, has resurfaced again and became an internationally debated issue in media, literature, politics and the arts. Panel 4 invites us to reconsider gendered-based violence as necessarily representative of all other violence, injustice and oppression. By way of looking into who is remembered and whose lives are worthy of being mourned (Judith Butler) and who is included into heroic history and who is forgotten, and whose lives matter less, this panel focuses on the artist’s work with omitted histories and with voices of others, especially women as those who contribute their voices to the artist’s work and as those to whom the artist dedicates her art. The film/music series Two Laments (2015-2020) which informs the Nirbhaya sister monuments, will be part of the conversation situating the monument in the context of “the global resonance of Weiss’ profoundly affective practice is testament to the artist’s desire to reimagine the world from a transregional feminist perspective” (Katarzyna Falęcka).

Panel 4 is moderated by Rick Bell and includes the artist as well as invited speakers: Julia Walker, Kamala Sankaram, Vanessa Gravenor and Weronika Elertowska.

SPEAKERS BIOS

Jasmin Aber

Jasmin Aber is the Director of the Creative Exchange Lab, and a licensed architect, trained in the United Kingdom. She is an urbanist with over twenty-five years of experience as a design practitioner. Jasmin is an academic, educator, mentor, and curator, as well as the co-founder and executive director of the CEL Center for Architecture and Design (CEL) in St. Louis. Her research work and design practice involve culture-led planning, utilizing music, art, and cultural heritage for placemaking and equitable and sustainable community and economic development. She is the co-curator of the 2019 exhibition Public Art, Public Memory: Who is Missing which engaged with contemporary discussion around expanding representation in our public monuments.

Rick Bell

Rick Bell teaches at Columbia University where he is helps direct the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space.  A registered architect in New York, Rick previously served as Executive Director of Design and Construction Excellence at the NYC Department of Design and Construction. While Executive Director of AIA New York, he was instrumental in establishing and animating the Center for Architecture. He was also a member of the LMDC Committee that wrote the program for the National 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center. After architectural studies at Yale and Columbia, he worked in offices in New York, France, and Switzerland. He was on the advisory board of the inaugural NYC Architecture Biennial in 2020 and currently serves on the Board of the Creative Exchange Lab.

Monika Weiss

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. Trained as a visual artist and classical pianist, Weiss creates synesthetic works, placing the visual on a par with the sonic and the haptic. A defining feature of Weiss’ practice is a commitment to exploring states of suspension or near stillness that disrupt the flow of time and hold a transformative potential. For Weiss, the poetic forms a language through which to explore the body, history, and violence. Her aesthetic vocabulary consists of recurring motives that include immersions in water, embryonic forms, the prostate body, lament, black cloth and digital doubling, forming a visual politics of affect. Weiss frequently employs her own body or choreographs other subjects, particularly women, to navigate histories of violence and sites of trauma. These works attend to the memorial landscapes of global conflicts like the Second World War, as well as to the recurring manifestations of gender-based violence. Public projects that take the form of ephemeral and site-specific environments constitute an important strand in Weiss’ practice. The artist’s exploration of public memory and cultural amnesia is underscored by a focus on the vulnerability of the female body in the context of the city. 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 (2023).

Her 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 ZamekUjazdowski 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. Weiss has exhibited alongside artists including Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Mona Hatoumand Shirin Neshat. Group exhibitions include an international video art survey at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, Greece (2016); Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art and The Prisoner’s Dilemma at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation/CIFO, Miami (2006 and 2008); Drawing Now: Between The Lines of Contemporary Art at Loughborough University, UK (2009), Alan Sondheim & Monika Weiss – Enunciation at Eyebeam, New York (2012) and the inaugural exhibition at Prague’s Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo) (2010). Her works are included in public and private collections worldwide, including Albertina Museum, Vienna, AU; Cisneros FontanalsArt Foundation/CIFO, Miami, FL; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; Frauenmuseum, Bonn, DE; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, PL; and Dimas de Melo Pimenta’s collection, Locarno, SW. The artist was born in Warsaw, Poland and has lived in New York City since 2000. The artist currently divides her time between New York and St. Louis, where she is on the faculty of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University.

The Nirbhaya monument by Monika Weiss is featured in the upcoming issue of Centerpoint Now, the publication of the World Council of Peoples for the United Nations (WCPUN), produced in collaboration with Streaming Museum, that highlights issues on the agenda of the international community and marks 75th Anniversary of the United Nations.

As part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art series Artists on Art, a 30-minute film with Monika Weiss will premiere on March 30th, in which the artist will talk about her response to Goya’s graphic works and discuss her own practice.

Weronika Elertowska

Weronika Elertowska is an independent curator of exhibitions and international art projects, and a photography based artist. Her work includes a number of interdisciplinary methods including digital registration, classical process and video – effortlessly moving in the sphere of objects, installations and photography. In 2009 she got a stipend from the Photography and Media Department at Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. She graduated with a Master Degree from the Multimedia Faculty at the University of Arts in Poznań, Poland. Since that time she has been a curator of several international exhibitions, including “781 km” and “PLT” in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her art works have been shown in Lithuania, Romania, Northern Ireland and Poland. She is part of the jury team from the Center of Polish Sculpture.”

Eulalia Domanowska

Eulalia Domanowska isformer Director of Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland. Currently Specialist for Art in Bialystok University of Technology; Academic Teacher/ Professor of Art History at Graphic Department of Warsaw School of Information and Technology, Art Historian, studied also Museology, Etnology, Swedish Art, Art and Gender, The Teacher’s Education, Computer and Teaching in Umeå University, Sweden.  Works as a Curator and Art Critic. Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art. Special interest: Art in Public Space and Sculpture Parks. Curator of about 100 exhibitions in Poland and other European countries. Recently curated Tony Cragg, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Henry Moore exhibitions in The Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko and few exhibitions of sculpture in public space. Founder of series of “Sculpture Today” conferences. Organizer of “Counter Monuments” conference in 2019.Member of AICA and IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Arts).

Vanessa Gravenor

Vanessa Gravenor is an artist, writer, and editor. Her artistic works and critical texts question how present-day materializations of violence are embedded within histories and demonstrate how retellings can be a place for power reversals, complicating what is recognized as official truth. Her work has been exhibited at nGbk, Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin, DE), Park Avenue Armory (NYC, US), Kim? (Riga, LV), and VBKÖ (Vienna, AT). She was shortlisted for the 13^th Lichter Art Award, Frankfurt, DE and has participated in VISIO, Lo Schermo dell’arte, for young artists in film. Her writing has been published with Third Text, N.Paradoxa Feminst Journal, and Sternberg Press.

Kamala Sankaram

Kamala Sankram, Composer/performer, is known for her “blazing high notes” (The Wall Street Journal,) and her “strikingly original” (New York Times) music. Performances have included Meredith Monk’s ATLAS (Los Angeles Philharmonic,) Anthony Braxton’s operas Trillium E, Trillium J and GTM (Syntax) 2017, and festivals including Operadagen Rotterdam and the Edinburgh International Festival. As a composer, she has received commissions from the Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, the PROTOTYPE Festival, and Shakespeare Theatre Company, among others. Her work with emerging technology has included two operas created for telematic performance and the world’s first virtual reality opera.

Julia A. Walker 

Julia Walker is Associate Professor of English and Drama, with joint appointments in the English and Performing Arts Departments at Washington University in St. Louis.  She is the author of Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voice, Words (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Performance & Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and numerous articles and essays.  At Washington University, she teaches courses in modern drama, literary modernism, theatrical modernism, literary theory, and performance theory.