my body is my shield

At least since 1948 there seems to be universal consensus that humans are endowed with inalienable rights and dignity. It has remained since then an open question: where are these rights protected? In her 24-hour performance “My Body is My Shield” Mia Florentine Weiss engages this contradiction with graphic and troubling explicitness. The performance took place in an isolation-cell at the very prison where the artist recruited her “Bed of Peace”.

“My Body is My Shield” uses the technique of contextualisation to reveal the internal contradictions of the performance’s symbolism. The artist’s body is present in two implicit senses: naked, thus symbolizing ultimate human vulnerability, and as a shield, behind which and in front of which she again physically appears. The shield’s message is inscribed with her blood; she is thus literally physically under and on top of the transparent shield. Her body and her shield also share the role of artistic canvas, and both mirror the manner in which Mia Florentine Weiss conceptualizes her physicality, reflected here in her duality as human artist and as human art.

The performance marks the first in a series of five performances that are based upon the five transparent police shields, each of which carries a poetic statement inscribed upon it in the artist’s own blood.