In the article “Critical Feminism in the Archives”, Marika Cifor and Stacy Wood write about the relevance of archives for social movements as a way of bringing attention to omitted persons, concepts, and narratives. Archives are junctions of power relations and as such part of patriarchal structures – therefore struggles initiated, populated, and led by women* need to be recorded and repeated for history. Feminist art engages with feminist politics, and a great deal of archival work has been done through research-based and documentary practices by contemporary artists.
One of them is Zuzanna Hertzberg’s exhibition titled Mechitza: Individual and Collective Resistance of Women During the Shoah. With historical research delving into female participation in the antifascist struggle of Jewish women during the Shoah, Hertzberg exposes heroines of the resistance fighting for survival.
In Hertzberg’s words, Mechitza constitutes a poetic and vivid point of departure for revisiting the memory of uncomfortable facts and narratives, which are deeply and permanently ingrained in the institutions and tools of writing history. In the tradition of archival practices, strongly marked by patriarchy, the guardians and notaries of the deposit are men and those women who agreed to speak on their behalf against the testimonies of other women. Zuzanna Hertzberg’s artistic practice aims at challenging this monopoly. As an artivist involved in correcting archival truths (read: myths), she looks for the germ of a new story in them, a herstory, a new affective archive based on women’s experience of war and violence.
The Mechitza is part of the 29th edition of the City of Women Festival program Archaeology of Resistance: Corrective for the Future. Zuzanna Hertzberg’s exhibition in Mala galerija – together with the works of Katia Kameli, Mónica de Miranda, Barbara Blasin, and Hristina Ivanoska, exhibited in the Škuc Gallery – researches historical figures/movements/media and brings them to public attention. Other works by Alicia Grullón and the SIDE collective, as well as the augmented reality walk by Amanda Gutiérrez, invent strategies to intervene in the present.
*The term woman and other words written in the feminine grammatical gender are used inclusively and address anyone who identifies with the female gender, as well as non-binary, trans-, a- and intergender people.
Curator: Iva Kovač
Production: Mesto žensk / City of Women
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
