The exhibition SALT. CLAY. ROCK. is open on January 7 until 7 pm, so that visitors of the nGbK Lecture Global Memory in the 21st Century have the opportunity to visit the exhibition in advance.

Mirjam Zadoff has been director of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism since 2018; her book Gewalt und Gedächtnis. Globale Erinnerung im 21. Jahrhundert (Violence and Remembrance. Global Memory in the 21st Century) was published in October 2023, the volume Trotzdem sprechen (Speaking Nonetheless), which she co-edited with Lena Gorelik and Miryam Schellbach, in April 2024. The latter brings together authors who, despite the divisions and upheavals in the cultural scenes in the wake of October 7 and the subsequent war, continue to work and exchange ideas.

Together with art historian and curator Julia Grosse, the aim of this conversation is to think things through together – and to do so on the basis of a concrete examination of the role of the arts, particularly public art. What can be gleaned from examples such as the current discussion on the Bismarck monument in Hamburg? What possibilities lie in endeavors such as the collective digital project „We Are Here“, initiated by Talya Feldman and dedicated to those affected by right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic attacks and racially motivated police violence? What happens when different lines of memory converge or come into tension?

The discussion will be held in German with English translation.

Mirjam Zadoff is director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Previously she was professor of history and held the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She was visiting professor at the universities of Zurich, Berkeley, Berlin and Augsburg, among other places. She is currently teaching at LMU Munich and TUM Munich.

Julia Grosse is an art historian and co-founder of Contemporary And (C&). She teaches at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts, and is a strategic and conceptual advisor at Gropius Bau in Berlin.