Esther Shalev-Gerz

Reference monograph

This monograph gives a comprehensive overview of the variety and scope of the research carried out by Esther Shalev-Gerz (*1948 in Vilnius, Lithuania, lives and works in Paris) over the past 20 years in her films, video-installations, photographs, and site-specific works (among them numerous projects for memorials and community-based schemes). The book aims to highlight the specific ways in which the artist deals with issues of knowledge, memory, history, and testimony through the space of the installation. As Shalev-Gerz states, “My terrain of investigation is the construction of memory. My aim is to challenge and disturb normalized expectations of memoires, and of historiography, by disrupting the various forms of official histories, including anthropology, ethnology, and museology.”

Essays by Nora Alter (Chair of Film and Media Arts at Temple University), Georges Didi-Huberman (philosopher and art historian, Professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), James E. Young (Professor of English and Judaic Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Annika Wik (Stockholm University, Department of Cinema Studies) will offer new insight into the artist’s work.

Published with the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.