Exhibition
Pola Weiss: Performing With The Video.
10 May 2016 – 5 Jun 2016
Event times
Tuesday to Saturday 12-6 pm
Address
- 96 Chalton Street
- Camden
- London
Greater London - NW1 1HJ
- United Kingdom
Pola Weiss ,Mexico City 1947-1990 was a pioneer of video art in Mexico and Latin America; her work includes diverse media forms staged for the video camera such as dance and music as well as technological experiments with video cameras and televisions.
About
Chalton Gallery is really delighted to present the exhibition of the prolific Mexican Artist Pola Weiss: Performing With The Video. This's her first retrospective in The UK and her first one in Europe since 1987. Weiss was a pioneer of video art in Mexico and Latin America; her work includes diverse media forms staged for the video camera such as dance and music as well as technological experiments with video cameras and televisions.
Weiss performed, filmed, edited and directed her own works. She called herself a Tele artist as she was deeply engaged with television in an art context. The exhibition presents 12 video works including seminal works such as Flor Cósmica 1977, Videodanza Viva Videodanza 1979 and Mi Corazón 1985. A series of historical documents from the Arkheia Archive will be displayed in order to shed light on her practice and how she challenged normative female experiences and relations between self, society and technology.
Pola Weiss Álvarez was born in Mexico City on the 3rd of May 1947. She studied a BA in Media Studies at UNAM University, where she began to experiment with video and television; so great was her interest for video and television that she produced videotape as a thesis for her graduation. Weiss travelled to New York in 1976 where she met Nam June Paik and other artists such as Shigeko Kubota, who further influenced her practice. Back in Mexico, she made Flor Cósmica 1977, her first video with which she participated in the 9th International Video Art Festival that took place at the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City. From that year until she took her own life on the 6th of May of 1990 she produced several television programs and videos in which she experimented with live dance performance, visual poetry, music, and visual effects.
Weiss exhibited her work in several museums and festivals around Europe and Latin America including the 1980 Venice Biennale as part of an international performance festival, in Paris Centre Georges Pompidou in 1979 and a retrospective in 1987 at the Centre d'Action Culturelle de Montbeliard in France.
As part of the exhibition there’s going to be weekly public programme of screenings, talks and performances.
The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the kind support of MUAC Museum, TV UNAM and The Arts Council of England.
