Monika Weiss Polish, b. 1964

Monika Weiss works across media and uses her own body to explore questions of private and public memory. Based in New York, Weiss seeks to enliven materials and sites by injecting her emotions and body into scenes that are evocative of collective social traumas. Her performance piece Phlegethon-Milczenie (2005), which was reproduced as an installation, photographs, and video, features the artist crawling through a sea of open books, all of which were published before the end of World War II. The work references the burning of books in Nazi Germany and suggests the primacy of the body over the mind.