Esther Shalev-Gerz (born Gilinsky) is a contemporary artist. She lives and works in Paris.
Biography
Esther Shalev-Gerz was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1948. In 1957, she moved with her family to Jerusalem.
From 1975 to 1979 she studied Fine arts at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design where she got her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She then lived in New York City for one year (1980/81).
From 1981 she participated in collective exhibitions in institutions such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
In 1983 she produced her first work in public space: Oil on Stone, a permanent installation in Tel Hai, Israel, for the Tel Hai Contemporary Art Meeting.
In 1984 the artist moved to Paris and started working through Europe and Canada.
In 1990 she got an artistic residency from the German Academic Exchange Service and moved to Berlin for one year.
In 2002 she stayed at the IASPIS residency in Stockholm.
From 2003 to 2014 she taught the Master of Fine Arts students in Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.Shalev-Gerz's biography on her website
Her latest major exhibitions were Ton Image me Regarde?!, 2010, in the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, in which ten of her installations were displayedEsther Shalev-Gerz, catalogue of the exhibition Ton image me regarde?!, Jeu de Paume and Fage Editions, Ronald Jones, I Saw It, frieze, UK, March, 2010Elizabeth Matheson, "Esther Shalev-Gerz Ton image me regarde!?", Ciel Variable n°86, Canada, September, 2010 and her retrospective entitled Between Telling and Listening, 2012, in the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, where she presented 15 of her installations. Besides, her work was the subject of an itinerary personal exhibition in Canada between 2012 and 2014, firstly in the Kamloops Art Gallery, then in the Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver and finally in the Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal.
In 2010 she received a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for her Artistic Research project Trust and the Unfolding Dialogue.
In 2012, she had the exhibition of her work, Describing Labor she created inspired by the collection of in The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, USA
In 2013 was released the illustrated anthology Esther Shalev-Gerz, The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues edited by Jason E. Bowman that gathers new texts around Shalev-Gerz's work and the notion of Trust as well as formerly published texts on her art. Among the authors are Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacqueline Rose, James E. Young, Lisa Le Feuvre.
In 2014 her team is one of the six finalists of the competition for the design of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, with the teams of Yael Bartana, Daniel Libeskind, Krzysztof Wodiczko, David Adjaye or Gilles Saucier.
In 2015 the Fonds municipal d'art contemporain of the city of Geneva acquired the artwork Les Inséparables, 2000-2010, a monumental double-clock installed as a permanent work in public space.
In 2016, her retrospective Space Between time was exhibited in Wasserman Projects in Detroit.
In 2017 through 2018, The Factory is Outside, her first retrospective in Finland in the Selachius Museum Gustaf in Mänttä, Finland.
In 2018, she exhibited 4 projects dealing with participation in the Koffler Gallery, Toronto, Canada: The Gold Room, 2016, The Place of Art, 2004, First Generation, 2004, and four chapters of The Portrait of Stories, 1998-2008.
In 2018, Esther Shalev-Gerz's commission of a permanent art work The Shadow is an embedded ghostly silhouette of a first-growth Douglas fir across the expanse of University Commons Plaza. The work measures 100x25m in total and is composed of 24000 three-shade concrete pavers.
Work overview
Esther Shalev-Gerz questions the perpetual construction of the relationship between an experience and the telling one gives of it. She analyses portraiture, which she understands as the reflection of a person, place or event. Her work invites the spectator to an opening to the ambiguities and multiplicities acting in the collective memory. Her installations, photography, video and public sculpture are developed through dialogue, consultation and negotiation with people whose participation provides an emphasis to their individual and collective memories, accounts, opinions and experiences. Constantly inquiring into transitional qualities of time and space and the correlative transformation of identities, locales and (hi)stories Esther Shalev-Gerz has produced a body of work that simultaneously records, critiques, and contributes to the understandings of the societal roles and value of artistic practice.Esther Shalev-Gerz, Listening Voices: On Actualizing Memories in Cultures and Globalization: Heritage, Memory and Identity by Helmut Anheir and Raj Isar, SAGE publications Ltd, London, United Kingdom, 2011
In her text entitled The Perpetual Movement of Memory, Shalev-Gerz describes her practice: "In my works in the public realm, a space is constructed for memories activated by participation, that is to say, the moment when the supposed spectator becomes a participant by writing his name, using his voice or sending in his photo. Thanks to the traces left during this acts, these participants keep the memory of their own participation in the work's procedure, which also bears witness to their responsibility to their own times."in Geht dein Bild mich an?/Does Your Image Reflect Me?, Sprengel-Museum, Hannover, Germany, 2002, p.87
In an interview with Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume, Shalev-Gerz adds: "I try to enter the space that opens between listening and telling in order to get away from the logic of discourse, that is to say, to accede to another kind of space and consider it artistically. It's a kind of "reveal" of the intelligibility of the sensible/sensitive or of a memory that differs from the one constructed by words, akin to concepts that traverse the body, able to be picked up by the gaze."in Esther Shalev-Gerz, catalogue of the exhibition Ton image me regarde?!, Jeu de Paume and Fage Editions, p.155
And also: "As an artist, it is very important for me to trust the participants – whom I approach (right away) as equals, and whose contributions are an element of the project. I think that this is what makes it possible to produce the work: trust in the other person's intelligence."in Esther Shalev-Gerz, catalogue of the exhibition Ton image me regarde?!, Jeu de Paume and Fage Editions, p.157
In his text entitled The Image of the Other, in the catalogue of the exhibition Does Your Image Reflect Me? Ulrich Krempel provides his understanding of Shalev-Gerz' work: "One thing is certain: only by talking and listening, passing on first-hand experience, images, emotional glances and moments, can we bring ourselves to the point where remembrance is converted into action".in Geht dein Bild mich an?/Does Your Image Reflect Me?, Sprengel-Museum, Hannover, Germany, 2002, p.85
Jacques Rancière in his text The Work of the Image, for the catalogue of MenschenDinge/The Human Aspect of Objects, republished in the catalogue of the Jeu de Paume show, described the artist's work in these words: "Esther Shalev-Gerz does not give voice to the witnesses of the past or of elsewhere, but to researchers that are at work in the here and now. She makes the ones who come from elsewhere speak of the present as they do of the past, of here as of there. She makes them speak about the way they have thought and arrange the relationship between one place and another, one time and another. But also the dispositifs that she constructs are themselves dispositifs that distend their words, and subject them to representation of the conditions governing their listening and uttering."in Esther Shalev-Gerz, catalogue of the exhibition Ton image me regarde?!, Jeu de Paume and Fage Editions, p.139
In his text Blancs-soucis of History written for the catalogue of the exhibition Esther Shalev-Gerz: Entre l'écoute et la parole in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, 2012, Georges Didi-Huberman describes the artist's work: "In her installations Esther Shalev-Gerz has never ceased to instigate dialogues, to give shape to interlocutory situations: she asks this and that person questions, she confronts faces and points of view, she worries about stories –even simple opportunities to smile –from everyone, she questions objects (like those found in the earth of Buchenwald camp in the work MenschenDinge –The Human Aspect of Objects, 2004-2006), practices (like photography), in the prism of each unique story, as in collective history. In doing so, she unceasingly questions transmission right down to its effects of disarray or perdition".
Some projects and exhibitions
Monument Against Fascism, Hamburg, Germany, 1986. Developed with Jochen Gerz via an international competition organized by the city of Hamburg-Harburg, the "Monument against Fascism" (1986–93) was a social experiment with an uncertain outcome. In a public square, the two artists erected column clad in lead beside which they provided a metal pencil and a panel with the following text translated in seven languages (English, French, German, Russian, Turk, Arabic and Hebrew): "We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 metre-high lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice." Since 1993, when the last stage of the monument was sunk into the ground, only a one-square-metre lead plate, the cap of the column, has been visible, along with an information board. A photo sequence documents the process of its disappearance. The active participation and appropriation, which took a wide variety of forms, eventually led to the disappearance of the visible object over the years.James E. Young, The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 2. (Winter, 1992), pp. 267-296Justin Branch, The Historiography of the Harburg Monument, University Thesis, Eton College, Windsor, United Kingdom, 1996Publication by Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz: Mahnmal gegen Faschismus, Cantz/Hatje Verlag Stuttgart, Germany, 1993 It was covered with some 70,000 names, entries and graffiti (x loves y or "Foreigners Out!") and their strikeouts. Swastikas and even traces of gunshots were found in the lead coating. Erase the Past, Berlin, Germany, 1991. In 1990, during her residency in Berlin and just after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Shalev-Gerz received as a present a portrait of Honecker sold off the street. She realized then this work as a slide series and a book both inspired by the flipbook. In the same room, one can see a portrait of Honecker or a portrait of Brecht. By flipping the images, one realizes that the portrait resists a zoom movement as it keeps the same size when the walls and furnitures shrink or enlarge.Catalogue: Erase the Past, DAAD editions, Berlin, Germany, 1991 Irreparable, Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon, France, 1996. In her first solo show in France, Shalev-Gerz presented her photographic series Irreparable as well as 15 other slideshows such as Just One Sky, Homage to Lucy Schwob or Sea of Stones.Catalogue by Esther Shalev-Gerz: Irréparable, Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon, France, 1996