N I R B H A Y A

monument | antimonument

stone, fiberglass, water, digital film, sound

approximate sculpture dimensions: 6’ x 17’ x 3’

Artist Statement

Who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how do we unforget violence, in order to remake a world without it? ­­

I am an artist and sound composer working across disciplines of sculpture, music and film. In my films and performances, the eyes of the protagonist are closed. She lies down in a state of meditative, symbolic and peaceful resistance, leaving marks and traces of presence in opposition to heroic fantasies of conquest and power. 

Nirbhaya is named for Jyoti Singh, aka ‘Nirbhaya’ (She, Fearless) who was raped and killed at the age of 23 in New Delhi in 2012. It is a memorial not for conquerors and war heroes but for forgotten victims of everyday violence. 

The inspiration for the Nirbhaya sculpture comes from the long tradition of triumphal arches, which embody victorious verticality, making wars and colonial invasions into heroic history. In Nirbhaya I place a triumphal arch down, mirroring it with its own double, to create a vessel filled with water. The triumphal arch no longer hovers above us. Instead, we look down into the water and see a specter of a woman, an underwater video projection. Her body is shrouded in long robe, her face morphs from one woman into another, making slow, universal gestures of lamentation. She eventually becomes a tree. 

The silence of the Nirbhaya monument is accompanied by a sequence of vocal compositions, in which my piano improvisations are transformed into a choral and ambisonic environment evoking Daphne, the mythological nymph that escaped rape through becoming a tree. The music evokes her skin hardening into a tree bark, her voice becoming whispering leaves. The escape from the violence is marked by her death but also by reincarnation into a new life form. 

Resembling an ancient sarcophagus, Nirbhaya honors women of all cultures and times who continue to undergo the trauma of rape, torture and death. A site of meditation and stillness, the monument offers a pathway for reimagining collective remembrance, abandoning victorious monumentality and celebrating the horizontal and peaceful future of humanity.

Support from my dear friend, Indian poet Meena Alexander (1951–2018) was invaluable in terms of my understanding of what has happened to Jyoti Singh as well as the cultural and social consequences of what my artistic response to this event may mean. Passages from our transcribed dialogue appear in the newest monograph on my work. Ideas about trauma, healing, transformation, of which we spoke, are foregrounding this project which I since developed.

Monika Weiss

FUNDRAISING

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has generously offered fiscal sponsorship in support of the fundraising campaign for Nirbhaya project internationally. Click “donate” button to find out more:

In cooperation with the New York City Parks Art in the Parks Program and Streaming Museum, Monika Weiss’ Nirbhaya is hosted at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza by Sherril Kazan, President, World Council of Peoples for the United Nations and President, Friends of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. Since 2024 the project is curated by Izabela Gola, independent curator and Visual Arts and Design Curator, Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Nirbhaya is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Nirbhaya is a fiscally sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts. Nirbhaya by Monika Weiss is supported by Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2019 Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC) has been overseeing technical development of Monika Weiss’ Nirbhaya. Nirbhaya by Monika Weiss Advisory Board is an evolving international group of cultural leaders who support the project and its message.

Inside the Nirbhaya sculpture, viewers notice a woman who is seemingly immersed in the water, thanks to an underwater video projection. The protagonist is gradually morphing from one woman into next. Silent gestures of lamentation are enacted in many iterations by women form around the world, whom the artist filmed in her Brooklyn studio. Composed of two different time sequences combined together, the moving image – which we see in the water filling the sculpture – represents two women at all times, who seem to be connected by their hip area, the site of trauma. From time to time, we see the same woman represented twice, symbolizing double presence, suggesting togetherness, sisterhood, as well as rebirth.

As the female figure gradually transforms from one woman into the next, from time to time she also, symbolically, becomes a tree. Referring to the myth of Daphne the artist abstract drawings appear in the underwater video projection, representing the moment in which Daphne’s skin becomes a tree bark. Thanks to film montage the process of reincarnation into a new life form becomes apparent.

While the sculpture and the underwater film projection are silent, an important element of Nirbhaya is music. Weiss composed live vocal music and choreography of movement which are meditative and without words or instrumentation. The performances will take place around the sculpture several times during the exhibition. Additionally, an online sound composition will be accessible via a barcode placed near the sculpture. Through the inclusion of music, water, and film projection, this work highlights the relevance of public memory as a living environment.

PUBLICATIONS

In 2019, Eulalia Domanowska and Marta Smolińska invited me to discuss Nirbhaya as part of a publication Sculpture Today IV (ANTI-monument. Non- traditional forms of commemoration, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.

In 2020 Nina Colosi, Sherril Kazan and Shamina de Gonzaga invited me to present Nirbhaya in CenterpointNow, published by World Council of Peoples for the United Nations in collaboration with Streaming Museum. This issue marked 75th anniversary of the United Nations.

In 2021, the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland proposed my project Nirbhaya for Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (DHP) located across from the UN headquarters in New York. The plaza is managed by New York City Parks, Friends of DHP and the World Council of People for United Nations. The proposal was approved in late 2022. Previous Polish artist exhibited at DHP plaza was Magdalena Abakanowicz in 2014.

In 2021 Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko published a monograph Monika Weiss – Nirbhaya, including the esteemed feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, The Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Mark McDonald, and a conversation between myself and poet Meena Alexander, among several other texts.

In 2021, Centre for Architecture St Louis CEL, organized an interdisciplinary symposium composed of 6 panel discussions, Monument|Anti-Monument, inspired by my work Nirbhaya. The symposium consisted of six virtual panel discussions moderated by NYC architect Rick Bell and hosted by CEL director Jasmin Aber. Each panel included myself as well several of the following speakers: Michael Arad, Lance Jay Brown, Nina Colosi, Chip Crawford, Eulalia Domanowska, Weronika Elertowska, Wendy Evans Joseph, Katarzyna Falęcka, Vanessa Gravenor, Percy Green, Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Jackson, Walter Johnson, David Lelyveld, Mark McDonald, Tyler Meyr, Gwen Moore, Eric Mumford, Verity Platt, Griselda Pollock, Leila Sadat, Kamala Sankaram, Jeffrey Smith, Buzz Spector, Julia Walker, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and James E. Young.

In 2022 Eulalia Domanowska invited me to present my writing about Nirbhaya in the publication Traces of Sisterhood, published by Salon Akademii, Warsaw in collaboration with TRACTS (Trace as a research agenda for climate change, technology studies, and social justice)

Essay Excerpt

“Mesmerizingly slow, soliciting prolonged immobility in enthralled gazing, calling for acute attention to subtle changes in the folds of cloth or movements of the draped body, in performance or filmed, provoking intense engagement with the choreography of poignant gestures of elegant hands winding and unwinding, rising and falling, with its own sonic environment that is neither music nor language, Monika Weiss’ works have long solicited our attention to historical events: forgotten, remembered, not yet mourned, or immemorial, so that we experience their condition affectively through a musically choreographed image of time: time is both her frame and medium. Nirbhaya is a complex project deeply resonant for the present. Inspired by a murderous event in the Indian city of Delhi in 2012, the artist calls us to be a remote, removed, belated but permanent witness to that event. As an artwork, however, Nirbhaya also converses creatively with the visual rhetorics and pathos formulae of European art during the periods of its most intense commitment to imagining life, death, power, desire, violence and ecstasy, fear and sorrow.”

- Griselda Pollock, art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in visual art and visual culture, in Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021 (click here to read full essay)

For more information about Monika Weiss - Nirbhaya publication and to order a copy, click here.