Zuzanna Hertzberg. Mechitza

Zuzanna Hertzberg. Mechitza

17.08 at 19:00 – opening, free admission

In the tradition of Judaism, a mechitza is a barrier separating a section of praying men in a synagogue who have full access to the ritual from marginalized women. The intention of Zuzanna Hertzberg’s project is to show that this segregation mechanism carries over into social life and is reproduced in the ways in which archival content is recorded, preserved and distributed, erasing the voice of women.

As part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising, the artist is presenting a project dedicated to recovering the herstories of Jewish women as active and full-fledged participants in armed and civil resistance in the ghettos and German Nazi death camps in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. In her practice, the artist, a Polish Jewess, has been creating a herstorical, affective archive of female combatants in an attempt to restore their figures to collective historical memory.

For Hertzberg, exploring the past and her own Jewish identity is also a way of co-creating the future. At the exhibition at Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, the artist also presents a new series of works inspired by a feminist reading of the story of Lilith, the rebel woman of Eden, a symbol of women’s liberation for generations of modern feminists. Referring to traditional images of the first woman, Hertzberg transforms them and combines them with her involvement in the contemporary anarcho-feminist movement, of which Lilit is the matron and great-grandmother.

The work “Mechitza. Individual and Collective Resistance of Women during the Holocaust” was presented at the 12th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Berlin and at the Center for Jewish History in New York, among other venues.

Zuzanna Hertzberg is an interdisciplinary artist, art activist and researcher. In 2018, she received her doctoral degree from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her artistic practicę consists̨ of painting, performance, fabric and assemblages. She is the author of installations and collages using archival resources. She engages in individual and collective practices to counter discrimination and violence against marginalized individuals and groups.