Based on my decade-long research-artivist project titled ”Mechitza. Individual and Collective Resistance of Women During the Shoah” and ”Jewish Anarchist Women against Hegemony” presented at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, as well as the project “Volunteers for Freedom”, I recover and pass on the long history of Jewish women’s militant resistance, which begun before the Second World War in the late 19th century anarchist groups and the Spanish Civil War anti-fascist International Brigades (1936-39).
Inspired by individual biographies of women, I show models of resistance undertaken by women during the Shoah.
How did Jewish women acquire the skills to fight against oppression? How can their resistance strategies be applied to our social activities and to the battles we fight today? How can we move the archive into the streets and give it a new life?
Zuzanna Hertzberg is an interdisciplinary artist, artivist, and researcher. Her art includes painting, performance, textiles, and assemblage. She is the author of installations and collages using archival materials. Hertzberg is interested in the interweaving of individual and collective memory, and in the search for identity in the mechanism of appropriation and restitution of minority heritage, especially women’s heritage, as well as issues of geopolitics and strategies of marginalization of uncomfortable narratives.
She is involved in individual and collective practices combating discrimination and violence against marginalized people and groups. The artist is the co-founder of the Jewish Antifascist Block, a member of the Antifascist Coalition, and a member of the board of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
Hertzberg earned her PhD degree at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (Spaces of Ignorance, 2018). She participated in a number of exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
www.zuzannahertzberg.com
Zoom: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/64719208170
The event series of WARP addresses the relations and linkages of knowledge in research on material culture, curation, technology, and art through lectures and workshops. Please find the programme of the event series and the Zoom link here: https://www.kulturtechnik.hu-berlin.de/en/warp/