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18:30–20:30 Uhr

Embodied Voices & Critical Narratives

Screening and Discussion|Featuring Monika Weiss and Vanessa Gravenor, moderated by Natasha Chuk

  • Goethe-Institut New York, New York, NY

  • English
  • Free
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Hand raised in a crowded room — What use is poetry?
Standing apart I looked at her and said — We have poetry
So we do not die of history. I had no idea what I meant.
— Meena Alexander, “Question Time” from Birthplace with Buried Stones (Northwestern University Press, 2013)


Situating transgenerational, feminist dialogues as modes of critique that disrupt dominant narratives, "EMBODIED VOICES & CRITICAL NARRATIVES" brings together New York-based artist and composer Monika Weiss and Berlin-based artist and writer Vanessa Gravenor. The program features their recent film and sound works, followed by a conversation moderated by media theorist and art writer Natasha Chuk. This program builds upon Weiss and Gravenor’s 2024 presentation, "Thinking History, Gender, and Violence," moderated by painter and curator Zofia nierodzińska at alpha nova & galerie futura in Berlin. Both editions are recorded towards a forthcoming publication. Resonating with Meena Alexander’s thoughts on poetry as a response to the pain of history, the presentation considers po-ethical strategy for working with its matter. Alexander (1951–2018) was an acclaimed poet and Weiss’ friend of many years; her poem Aletheia (Girl in River Water) is set to music in Weiss’s work presented at Goethe-Institut New York.

"Embodied Voices & Critical Narratives” adds another chapter to the artists' long-standing cross-generational friendship understood as feminist practice. Following a screening of two selected works—the world premiere of Malleus-Medusa (2024–2026) by Weiss and the first chapters of Gravenor’s Es gibt keine Gefahr [There is no Danger] (work in progress) —the conversation will explore how their sonic, performance-based, and moving-image practices serve as vehicles of critique. Rooted in affective feminist theories, these works explore visual and sonic resonances of co-presence. Tracing traumatic memories through sonic layers and urban landscapes, Weiss and Gravenor employ the voice and body to engage with the human, more-than-human, and ecological processes that write histories from the feminist margins. By intercepting these voices, the artists resist cultural pressures to erase the traumatic, offering paths through transformative storytelling. While Gravenor’s work employs semi-documentary and confessional methods to archive and disrupt narratives, Weiss’s performative, musical, and movement-based lamentations propose a return to the archaic, tangible, and ecofeminist transnationality.

The artists wish to thank the following institutions that supported the projects on view: Special Collections at Washington University Libraries; WhiteBox, New York; The 2025 Stone DeGuire Contemporary Art Award; Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis; and Schleswig-Holsteinisches Künstlerhaus.
 

Participants

  • Dr. des Vanessa Gravenor’s artistic research investigates the aftermaths and aftereffects of secret military operations, and how these resound on words, images, and psyches that distort and skew the perception of histories. Employing the intimate lens of auto-fiction, her works depart from embodied experience, grounding screen cultures in the affective. Selection of presentations include: Transmediale Studio (2025); Goethe Institut Toronto, CA (2024); Daïmôn, Gatineau, CA (2023); 68th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, DE (2022); 38th Kasseler Dok und Videofest, Kassel, DE (2021); Lichter Art Award, Frankfurt, DE (2020); Kim?, Riga, LV (2020); Park Avenue Armory, NYC, USA (2019). She was the co-editor together with Prof. Dr. Hanne Loreck of the online publication Archives of the Body – The Body in Archiving (2024), HFBK-Hamburg. She completed her hybrid practice theory doctorate, “keeping secret,” at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in winter 2026.
     

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  • Monika Weiss is a New York-based artist, filmmaker, and composer investigating history, mythology, and trauma. Her vocal music, choreography of slow movement, sonic environments, and film-based installations evoke ancient traditions of lamentation, often featuring women co-performers. A NYSCA and NYFA Fellow and Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Weiss was featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Artists on Artworks (2021). Her work is held in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Memory & Human Rights (Santiago), Frost Art Museum, CCA Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), and Lehman College Art Gallery (CUNY). She has exhibited globally at Frauenmuseum, Kunsthaus Dresden, CIFO, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and Goethe-Institut New Delhi, and in New York’s Whitney Museum, WFC Winter Garden, A.I.R. Gallery, WhiteBox, and Harvestworks. Recent highlights include a 2024 Laumeier Sculpture Park commission and a permanent acquisition by the Centre of Polish Sculpture, which published her monograph Nirbhaya (2021).
     

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  • Natasha Chuk, PhD is a New York City-based media theorist, arts writer, lecturer, and independent curator engaged with the histories and philosophies of creative technologies and their entanglements with perception, aesthetics, embodiment, identity, and cultural imagination. Her writing and criticism have appeared in numerous periodicals, edited volumes, and artist catalogues, and she is the author of two books: Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025) and Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015).
     

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