Talk with Cana Bilir-Meier and Talya Feldman, moderated by Gürsoy Doğtaş

The artists Cana Bilir-Meier and Talya Feldman discuss with Gürsoy Doğtaş how the digital project WIR SIND HIER, conceived by Feldman, gives a voice to the survivors and families of victims of racist and anti-Semitic violence and expresses their demands for places of remembrance in public space.

From the renaming of streets to the design of monuments, spaces of active remembrance and resistance are claimed. As a living archive, the platform provides users with an overview of right-wing violence and police violence in Germany and the former GDR over the last 40 years, including cases of violence that have not yet been recognised as hate crimes by state authorities.

WIR SIND HIER was first presented in 2022 as a digital artwork by the Kunstverein in Hamburg and shortly afterwards as a model project of the Federal Agency for Civic Education from 2022-2023. It continues today with the kind support of the Postcode Lottery and private foundations.

The platform and installation WIR SIND HIER is a project by Talya Feldman under the auspices of the Association of Counselling Centres for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence (VBRG e.V.)

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Cana Bilir-Meier lives and works in Munich and Vienna. She studied art and digital media as well as film and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. She works as a filmmaker and artist as well as in art and cultural education projects. Her filmic, performative and text-based works operate at the interfaces between archive work, text production, historical research, contemporary media reflexivity and archaeology. She is co-founder of the initiative in memory of Semra Ertan and co-editor of the poetry collection ‘Mein Name ist Ausländer - Benim Adım Yabancı’. In 2021, she was a substitute professor for art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Talya Feldman is a media artist from Denver, Colorado. She received her MFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through her cross-cultural and collaborative practice, Feldman creates social change through artistic and educational projects that offer alternative and restorative narratives to violence. She has received global recognition for her work against right-wing terror in collaboration with activist and research-based networks in Germany and abroad. Feldman has received numerous awards, including the Federal Prize for Art Students in Germany in 2023, the Berenberg Culture Prize in 2022, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship Award in 2021 and the DAGESH Art Prize in 2021 for her sound installation ‘The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts’ at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Gürsoy Doğtaş is an art historian and curator. He works paracuratorially at the intersections of institutional critique, structural racism and queer studies. He has (co-)curated exhibitions including ‘There is no there there’ at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2024), ‘Annem işçi - Wer näht die roten Fahnen?’ at the Museum Marta Herford in Herford (2024), ‘Gurbette Kalmak / Bleiben in der Fremde’ (2023) at the Taxispalais in Innsbruck and the festival ‘What would James Baldwin do?’ (2024) in Berlin as well as the symposium ‘Public Art: The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities’ (2021) in Nuremberg. In 2022/23 he taught as a visiting professor at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts and from this autumn he is a QuiS Visiting Research Fellow at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt.