Esther Shalev-Gerz
Entre l’écoute et la parole / Between Telling and Listening.

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne hosted the first major solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Esther Shalev-Gerz in Switzerland. The Lausanne retrospective provided a rich panorama of the artist’s work, featuring her slide projections, photographs, video installations, and public space projects.

In the exhibition designed by Esther Shalev-Gerz for the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, the artist created a journey reflecting the different phases of her production. Major works were presented in a non-chronological order, aligned with the rhythm of the rooms and the questions they explored. Questions of places and landscapes, questions of memory traces contained in objects or narratives, questions of portraits articulated through both speech and silence.

Born in Lithuania in 1948, raised in Israel, and now living in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz has been working for over twenty years on themes related to the construction of memory, whether personal or collective. Her reinterpretation of history is firmly anchored in the present of its protagonists: most of her works are created in dialogue with people—whether they are the inhabitants of a specific place or witnesses of a particular event. The past is always read through the present of those who remember it or work with its remnants. Through various narratives, in the space between listening and speaking, and through the setups of her installations, Esther Shalev-Gerz creates new spaces to address the issues of memory, testimony, and our relationship with history.