police shields

For over a decade, the theme of protection has been a recurrent topic in Mia Florentine Weiss’s art. And the idea behind her series of police shield works dates back to the summer of 1999. While she was staying in Moscow, the Second Chechen War broke out. A series of bombings left several buildings in ruins, burying many civilians beneath them. The images of the Russian police and militia holding shields in front of them while patrolling subway stations and streets—such images came back to haunt her. The shields came to symbolize both a precarious form of protection and an equally obvious vulnerability: the soldiers on the streets were meant to suggest that the population was being protected, and yet they immediately symbolized the presence of a horrific threat.

It was during this time that Mia Florentine Weiss formulated the five short statements for what would become her series of “Protection Shields”. The number of shields corresponds to the number of continents where violence still rages.

What’s your Place of protection?
My body is my shield
My word is my sword
I am a warrior for love - no one cuts my heart in half
My poem became my flesh

In distinction to the shields used by the police in Moscow, the shields used by Weiss are entirely transparent, revealing everything behind them. In fact, and despite the curve in their design, it doesn’t seem to matter which side you are on, whether behind or in front of them: at a museum exhibition, the shields were hung from the ceiling by chains so that you could do just that. The transparency is only impaired where the artist has used her own blood to inscribe her statements upon them. Each of the five shields will be used in a separate performance at a different place on the globe to which the poem on the shield belongs. The first—“My body is my shield”—was used for a 24-hour performance in an isolation-cell at a jail in Kassel, Germany.