Panel 2 NIRBHAYA —FILM, SOUND, WATER & LAMENT
Nirbhaya – Film, Sound, Water & Lament
Panel 2 Recording: https://vimeo.com/538176481
Panel 2 is moderated by Rick Bell and includes the artist as well as invited speakers: Monica Weiss, Nina Colosi, Verity Platt, and Mark McDonald.
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 place in conjunction with two concurrent solo exhibitions: Monika Weiss – Monument | Anti-Monument (March 31st – April 22nd, 2021) at CEL, and Monika Weiss: Nirbhaya (March 27th – May 22nd, 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 in the public sphere.
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, both 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 and will be announced soon. 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 (CDT), 1PM (EDT), 17:00 (GMT), 18:00 (GMT+1).
Panel 2 | Friday, March 26
Nirbhaya: Film, Sound, Water and Lament
The Nirbhaya sculpture is a vessel containing water and a moving image, which appears inside the water and shows the specter of a woman shrouded in a long black robe, moving silently, her face gradually morphing from that of one woman into that of another. She then becomes a tree. Panel 2 focuses on Nirbhaya’s anti-monumentality, as well as the use by Monika Weiss of a silent filmed image appearing inside water, joined to material drawings, and the lingering impact of sound, together forming a space of lamentation. The second panel in the series, taking place on March 26th, addresses the artist’s series of large-scale drawings Dafne (for Nirbhaya), depicting a moment of reincarnation, when the living body of a woman is changed into the living body of a tree. With this transformation, Monika Weiss challenges us to imagine and investigate a world without violence. The sound installation Metamorphosis (Dafne), also by Monika Weiss, a trained composer, will be discussed as an important component of the Nirbhaya monument. This sound piece will be concurrently installed at a short physical distance from the silent work of sculpture, both located in the public park of the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.
Panel 2 is moderated by Rick Bell and includes the artist as well as invited speakers: Monica Weiss, Nina Colosi, Verity Platt, and Mark McDonald.
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.
Nina Colosi
Nina Colosi founded and directs Streaming Museum, launched in 2008, that produces and presents programs of art and world affairs that have reached millions on seven continents in public spaces, at cultural and commercial centers, and StreamingMuseum.org. Colosi collaborated with World Council of Peoples for the United Nations on their publication “Centerpoint Now” marking the UN’s 75th anniversary. Following her early career as an award-winning composer, she produced new media exhibitions internationally, and, in NYC, for The Project Room for New Media and Performing Arts at Chelsea Art Museum and Digital Art @Google program series at Google headquarters.
Eulalia Domanowska
Eulalia Domanowska is an art historian, art critic, and curator of over 100 exhibitions in Poland and Europe, as well as academic lecturer. She was director of the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko between 2016-2019. Member of the AICA and IKT organizations (Association of Contemporary Art Curators), she has been the editor-in-chief of the Orońsko Quarterly from 2016-2019. Since 2016, Domanowska is the founder and main organizer of the international scholarly conference Sculpture Today. Between 2002-2006 she conducted research in the field of Swedish language, art, museology, ethnology and gender art at the University of Umeå in Sweden. She is currently an art specialist at the Bialystok University of Technology. She is particularly interested in modern and contemporary art, art in public space, art in the landscape and sculpture parks.
Mark McDonald
Dr. Mark McDonald is curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where he is responsible for Italian, Spanish, Mexican and early French prints and illustrated books. He joined The Met in 2014 after working at the British Museum as curator. He has curated exhibitions at the British Museum and Museo Nacional del Prado among others. He has published widely on the graphic Arts. The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus: 1488-1539 (2006) won the Mitchell Prize for Art History and Apollo Book of the Year. More recent publications include Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain (2012), a study of Goya’s Disasters of War (2014), six volumes on the Print collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo (2019) and Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain (2020) that was recently awarded the Eleanor Tufts Prize. He has taught at the Courtauld Institute in London and IFA in New York.
Verity Platt
Verity Platt is a professor of History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (2011) and has edited volumes on The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History (2017) and the Embodied Object in Classical Antiquity (2018). In her work as a writer, editor (of Classical Receptions Journal), and teacher, she explores the many ways in which the tropes of classical monumentality continue to be appropriated, reworked, challenged, and subverted in the 21st Century. She received her DPhil in Classics from Oxford University.
Panel 1 | Friday, March 12
Nirbhaya: Two Sister Monuments
Panel 1 Recording: https://vimeo.com/527541438
Panel 1 discusses Nirbhaya memorial in the context of Monika Weiss’ art overall which, “speaks against violence at levels that reach back to the most archaic origins of ritual confrontations with life and death, terror and pathos” (Griselda Pollock). It looks at Nirbhaya in the context of the ancient traditions of Lament understood as musical and political gesture within public sphere. Through the artist’s use of prolonged slow time, spatialized horizontality and shared lamentation her art addresses forgotten or erased histories of violence occurring in the global public sphere – especially those committed against women. Panel 1 offers a look into the background history of Nirbhaya, which the artist began in 2015 with a series of short experimental films and sound works, Two Laments (19 Cantos), chiefly among them Canto 4 created in collaboration with the late Indian poet, Meena Alexander. As a monument devoted to forgotten victims of everyday violence, which the artist named after Jyoti Singh, Panel 1 investigates Nirbhaya also responding to traditions of victorious monumentality and colonialism as represented by triumphal arches, specifically India Gate, which Monika Weiss symbolically places down to undo its victorious verticality.
Panel 1 is moderated by Rick Bell and includes the artist as well as invited speakers: Griselda Pollock, Gwen Moore, Dorota Monkiewicz, Tyler Meyr, and David Lelyveld.
Panel 1 Registration and RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nirbhaya-two-sister-monuments-panel-discussion-1-tickets-142610462733
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 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 (Moderator)
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.
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst of feminist, international, postcolonial, queer studies in the visual arts and visual cultures. Known for her theoretical and methodological innovations and interpretations of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory, Pollock has challenged her own discipline. Her book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, co-authored with Rozsika Parker (1981), just republished in 2020, is a still relevant and radical critique of art history and its gender-selective canon. It has become a classic text in feminist art history, as has her book, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. (1988) Developing transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art and its new forms and media, she is recognized as a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies. In March 2020, Pollock was named as the 2020 Holberg Prize Laureate for her ground-breaking contributions to feminist art history and cultural studies. Griselda Pollock is now professor emerita at the University of Leeds where she taught for 43 years. She has published 22 monographs, with four more forthcoming. Her most recent monograph is Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press, 2018).
David Lelyveld
David Lelyveld is a historian of modern India, especially the social and cultural history of north Indian Muslims and the Urdu language community during the period of British rule leading up to and beyond the partition of India in 1947 and the birth of Pakistan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Minnesota, Columbia, Cornell, and retired as professor at William Paterson University. His frequent sojourns in South Asia go back nearly sixty years, shared over a period of forty years with his late partner, the poet Meena Alexander, who collaborated with Monika Weiss in the early stages of this project dedicated to the tragedy of Nirbhaya.
Gwen Moore
Gwen Moore is the Curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity at the Missouri Historical Society focusing on race, ethnicity, and race relations in St. Louis. Gwen has been associated with the Society since 1998 working as a researcher, community programmer and oral historian. Her current area of research is concerned with social movements with a particular interest in civil rights activism. An important part of her work has been documenting local protests surrounding the unprovoked killings of African Americans which includes a collecting initiative and an oral history project. In addition, Gwen is currently at work on an exhibition focusing on Black life during the Jim Crow era.
Tyler Meyr AIA, LEED AP. Managing Director, Principal Lamar Johnson Collaborative
Tyler Meyr is a leading conceptual thinker with a strong national and international portfolio of projects including built work in Los Angeles, London, Antwerp, St. Louis, and Istanbul. Tyler utilizes his experience in urban design, planning, and architecture to address the complex challenges of today’s urban environment. Tyler’s unique blend of urban design and architecture talent allow him to serve as a link between the two disciplines, synthesizing context and program, along with the input of vital stakeholders into a cohesive vision. Dorota Monkiewicz. Specializing in feminist, critical and conceptual art, Dorota Monkiewicz is the author of over 100 publications on contemporary art. She was curator of contemporary art at the National Museum in Warsaw (1990-2009) and was selected twice to be the president of the Polish Section of the Association of Art Critics. In 2005–2007, she was a member of the Program Board of the Museum of Modern Art. Dorota Monkiewicz currently works at the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, the National Heritage Institution – a public park and a collection that contains numerous works by esteemed contemporary Polish and international artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz and Miroslaw Balka, and where Monika Weiss’ first iteration of “Nirbhaya