New Perspectives: “Performing Gestures, Enacting Sites”

Moving within and beyond the traditional boundaries of the visual arts toward an understanding of pictorial, sonic, filmic, and embodied sites and events, Weiss will refer to ancient Greek tragedy and the concept of energeia—the powerful, vivid presentation of action that creates an immediate reality and intense feeling for the audience. This program is part of the Kemper Art Museum's New Perspectives series and Weiss’s spring 2026 seminar, "Beyond Words, Beyond Images: Representation After History," which focuses on art and public space.

About the Artist

Monika Weiss is an internationally recognized Polish-American intermedia artist based in New York City and St. Louis. She currently serves as a professor of art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and is an affiliate professor of performing arts in Arts & Sciences. Weiss’s expansive practice—spanning vocal and electronic music, film-based installations, and public sound sculptures—explores themes of time, memory, and history through slow-motion choreography and spatialized sound. Rooted in ancient rituals of lamentation, her work transforms multisensorial spaces into vehicles for cultural transformation.

Weiss’s ongoing project, Nirbhaya—a tribute to victims of gender-based violence—further cements her role as a vital voice in contemporary feminist art, as documented in the 2021 monograph on her work featuring an essay by the British art historian Griselda Pollock. Weiss’s recent work includes the sound sculpture Metamorphosis, which was acquired into the permanent collection of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko in 2024; a sister version of the installation was featured at Laumeier Sculpture Park in 2024–25.

Since 2023, Weiss’s work and related correspondence are preserved in the art historian Julia P. Herzberg papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Her work has been featured at major institutions globally, including the Whitney Museum, Frost Art Museum, North Dakota Museum of Art, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Frauenmuseum, Kunsthaus Dresden, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Streaming Museum, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, and WhiteBox. As part of the Artists on Artworks series, The Metropolitan Museum of Art premiered a film in 2021 in which Weiss explores trauma and gesture in the graphic work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya in the context of her own intermedia practice.

New Perspectives

New Perspectives talks are opportunities for established and emerging scholars to conduct research and give a public talk on the Museum’s collection. The talks are given by faculty and graduate students in Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and focus on one or more works from the collection, aligning with the speakers’ own expertise and disciplinary interests.

Image credit: Paul Takeuchi

Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987), Martha Graham (Lamentation), 1986. Screen print on Lenox Museum Board, 36 x 36 in. Extra, out of the edition. Designated for research and educational purposes only. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.

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