Wrath

by Kalliopi Minioudaki

in Fireflies in the Night Take Flight, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, 2016

Monika Weiss’ Wrath (Canto 1, Canto 2, Canto 3) is a poignant ritualistic contemplation on all kinds of violence whose gendered association of wounded female and urban bodies resonates with the contemporary refugee crisis in Greece. Its conception, however, harkens back to an unrealized all-women performance inspired by the Arab Spring, while its realization was triggered by an encounter with a female Iranian architect and practicing Muslim, temporarily living in the US, in 2014. Part of the multimedia series Shrouds, the video foregrounds a signature performative device in Monika Weiss’ recent work—lamentation—as a powerfully political, yet fundamentally ethical means to deal with personal, gendered and collective trauma by “dignifying and veiling it with anonymity,” in the artist’s words.

Wrath is a tripartite film and sound composition set in three movements. The silent Canto 1 begins with the nearly motionless specter of the architect conflated with a map of her hometown, Tehran. The “bodies” of the girl and the city are stamped with Weiss’s textual response to a violent incident that she recalled during a conversation with the artist in her studio. In Canto 2, the architect performs silent, nearly motionless gestures of lamentation choreographed by the artist. The haunting splitting of her body, peeling herself from her scarf while veiling and unveiling herself, is accompanied by the vocal performance of a recombination of the text of Canto 1 in Farsi (Persian) by the voice of another woman. Evocative of the girl’s experience of Tehran when she irreverently ran through its streets without her scarf after having been hit by her husband, “unveiing” highlights the vulnerability of the female body in urban space.

A piano improvisation by the artist, who is also a classically trained musician, dramatizes the abstract graphic quality of Canto 3, sensuously merging the asphyxiated veiled body of the architect with the folds of a rippling shroud in an intricate audiovisual poetic response to her story, Weiss’ ultimate artistic lament.