The 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is underway in Berlin, where Polish artist Zuzanna Herzberg is presenting her installation combined with a spoken performance. Hertzberg’s work is a continuation of her decade-long research into the stories, or rather histories, of Polish Jewish women.

Presented at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hertzberg’s work consists of large-format textiles that document the lives and activities of the heroines. Alongside images of their faces, recorded in identity documents and photographs from group meetings, there are articles by them and maps of the places where they were operating. The collection, as a whole, resembles flags or curtains, which is meant to remind the mechitza – a wall or curtain in an Orthodox Judaism synagogue, separating the men’s area from the women’s area.

By constructing an affective archive of the women of the resistance movement, the artist attempts to reconstruct and understand their strategies of coping with the reality of war, and to protect the female combatants from oblivion. She also bases her observations and research on her own Polish-Jewish identity. The artist’s work was previously shown at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Zuzanna Hertzberg is interested in the interweaving of individual and collective memory, the search for and reconstruction of identity, especially for women, and issues of geopolitics. The artist works at the intersection of arts – in her activities she combines painting and performance; she creates textiles, installations, assemblage, using archival materials.

This year’s Berlin Biennale is held under the motto ‘Colonialism, Fascism and Fields of Emotion’. Zuzanna Hertzberg’s presentation, prepared in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, can be viewed until 18 September.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński