ASYA GEFTER

Asya Gefter is an artist and researcher working on practice-based approaches to storytelling, memory and history. Her projects examine the crossings of the personal and the political across socio-historical and geographical spaces, and have been displayed in Bosnia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine – see Public.

Since 2020 Asya lives in Trieste, a place she chose for its complexities and location, between Moscow of her childhood and London of her adulthood. Her discovery of darkroom printing at London’s Chats Palace in mid-2000s led her to the building’s attic, where she found a visual archive, under discarded community arts props, which has shaped her work about Hackney’s radical but hidden past of cultural and political resistance going back to the 1970s. Multimedia project Fragments of Memory began as an investigation into the interwar avant-garde milieu of the Yiddish poet and critic Debora Vogel, and morphed into a searching meditation on historical memory in the city of Lviv, Ukraine, where Vogel died in the Holocaust. Ongoing research Stories of Not Asking and Not Telling contemplates lost and elusive family stories, the complications of broken inheritances, the reciprocity between political repression and familial amnesia, and the experiences reflected in the wider history. On 24.02.2022 Asya initiated Trieste Emergenza Ucraina.