Talya Feldman

The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts

18-channel sound installation

2021

This installation investigates the continuities of right-wing terror in Germany from 1979 to the present through the collected voice message recordings of survivors, families of victims, and initiatives. 

The voices emanate from over 18 cities across Germany and cover only a handful of the hundreds of antisemitic, racist, and xenophobic assassinations and attacks that have taken place over the last 40 plus years. The maps of the cities are printed on scaffold netting that hang from floor to ceiling. Scaffold netting is meant to protect passers-by from falling debris and future harm. The absence of the metal rods intimates the fatal consequences of an ongoing lack of security and support for minorities in the public sphere.

The audio messages are visualized on smartphone displays in deference to their original format: as voice recordings shared between people during the last year of pandemic from city to city in German, Turkish, English, Spanish, Hebrew, and French.

The voices pulse like heartbeats and lines of continuity, echoing across time and space to commemorate these instances of violence and their victims and to amplify the fight for remembrance, for accountability, for justice and for a better future in Germany.

Exhibition Text, Jüdisches Museum Berlin

For this project, Talya Feldman was awarded the 2021 DAGESH Art Prize by DAGESH: Jewish Art in Context and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It has since been exhibited in Berlin, Halle (Saale), Lübeck, and at the Kloster Fenswegen as part of the What’s Art Got To Do With It? summer series, and with support from the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn.