Pola Weiss

Mexico 1947–1990

Paraíso is honoured to pay tribute to Pola Weiss Alvarez.

Pola Weiss was an extraordinary Mexican artist of the postmodern period. She is widely considered a pioneer of video art and video dance in Mexico and Latin America. Her work was deeply conceptual, and she was among the first to explore cyborg themes and ideas as part of her artistic investigations. Pola Weiss deserves the same recognition afforded to the great artists of all time.

Weiss conceived of the video camera as her daughter, and envisioned it as an extension of her own body. She was captivated by the possibilities of video and the expressive freedom offered by the moving image — to the point of allowing the machine to speak on her behalf, and calling for it to be seen as her other self. She foresaw television not as something watched, but as something that watches. She embodied the attributes of both machine and woman, simultaneously.

“First of all, I am a teleasta. For me, video is like my other voice, my other gaze, my other self,” said Pola Weiss (MX, 1947–1990), introducing herself early in her career. From the mid-1970s, Weiss produced video art and television programmes in which she experimented with dance, performance, music, text, and analogue visual effects.

Weiss produced over 35 videos and participated in numerous international video art festivals and exhibitions, including the Video Art and Performance Festival in Venice (1979) and Pola Weiss Mexico at Montevideo art gallery in Amsterdam (1979).