Artist talk: Shelley Harten in Conversation with Maya Schweizer

The artist Maya Schweizer won the 2023 Dagesh Art Award with the video installation Sans histoire. In her work, she engages with the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) as a site of remembrance, and calls into question general mechanisms of storing knowledge. Sans histoire presents the thought experiment of a consciousness that is “without history:” What happens when memory fades in the face of historical upheavals, climate catastrophe, and, ultimately, the finitude of human existence?

In the current exhibition Sans histoire, the JMB presents Maya Schweizer's video work of the same name as well as three of her other films. In the Artist Talk, curator Shelley Harten (JMB) will speak with the artist about the making of her films, their perspectives on collective and individual remembrance – and on forgetting – and what questions they prompt in the context of the Jewish Museum Berlin.