Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

A video work, in which the daily routine of Les Milles is caught up by its past - a former brickyard in the town`s center was used as internment camp for Germans during World War II and served as concentration camp later on. With the use of montage cutting techniques the artist succeeds in letting the past burst into present.

Maya Schweizer was born in 1976 in Paris, France and studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, and Berlin University of the Arts (with Lothar Baumgarten). Maya Schweizer works with diverse media: the focus of her work lies in the making of short films based on documentary material. „Identity, biography, politics, history and memory are recurring themes in Maya Schweizer’s photographs and videos... In general, the artist generates an incomplete tableau of collective memory and questions the way history is produced and visually recorded. „(Cynthia Krell). The artist approaches the relation of montage editing techniques with the concept of film and memorial and film as memorial — a relation which traces back to the very beginnings of montage as it does to research findings by French historian Pierre Nora. Recurring moments in Schweizer’s multiform art practice revolve around the examination of subtly treated processes of memory regarding historic-political events in public space. In the places, structures and situations she investigates, historical threads intersect. She received international grants and most recently Project grant "Lieux de Mémoire and Desire",Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen (KdFS), 2015. The Exhibition sponsor from the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), TCG Nordica, Kunming, China, 2013. The Robert Bosh Foundation, in Slovakia 2011, also in the Villa Aurora, Artist Grant from the Goethe-Institute in Los Angeles 2008-2009. Together with Clemens von Wedemeyer, she won the Prize of the German Competition at the Oberhausen Film Festival Oberhausen 2006. She recently had solo shows, such as; Der sterbende Soldat von Les Milles, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany 2015. Edith Seeshow’s Notes at the Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2013. Metropolis. Report from China with Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2011. The Same Story Elsewhere at the Westfälisher Kunstverein, Münster, Germany, 2010. Schweizer was also involved in many international exhibitions, such as; Inside the City. Public Space and Free Space at the GAK, Bremen, Germany, 2015. Vot ken you mach ?, Muzeum Wspólczesne Wroclaw, Poland, 2015. Collection Alphabet at the Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK), Leipzig, 2014. The city that doesn´t exist at Ludwig Forum, Aachen, 2012. Ambigous Being, Hong Gah Museum,Taipei 2012. Take me to your leader!, Kunstmuseum Bergen, Norway, 2011. Here and There, at the Wallace Gallery, New York and at the Oonagh Young Gallery, in Dublin, 2011. 15 Jahre Villa Aurora. Transatlantische Impulse, AdK - Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2011. Of Other Spaces at the Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus, Ohio, USA 2011.