Zuzanna Hercberg

Zuzanna Hertzberg, PhD (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, artivist, and researcher.

Her artistic practice includes painting, textile works, and public space interventions. She creates installations and collages incorporating archival materials, often accompanied by spoken-word performances. Her work explores the interweaving of individual and collective memory.

By building an affective archive, she investigates the mechanisms of marginalization of minority groups and the politics of erasing inconvenient narratives—especially those of women—from historical memory. In her artistic strategy, she treats archives as tools for reclaiming truth about the past, updating their message to promote the idea of the struggle for social justice, with a vision of a more equal future.

She is actively engaged in both individual and collective practices that counter discrimination and violence against marginalized people and communities.

In 2018, she earned a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Spaces of Un-Knowing, 2018). She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, as well as in research and artistic residencies.

Her interdisciplinary art project Volunteers of Freedom, focusing on Jewish women in the International Brigades, has been presented as part of the exhibition The Independent. Women and the National Discourse at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2018/19), Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (2020/21), the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2022), and the Tallinn Art Hall (2024).
Her research-based artivist project Mechitza. Individual and Collective Resistance of Women During the Holocaust was shown at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (2019), the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2022), the Center for Jewish History in New York (2022/23), Mala Galerija in Ljubljana (2023), and as part of the project Materializing. Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (2023).

She is currently developing a project dedicated to Jewish anarchist women. In her recent works, she explores the motif of the biblical Lilith—the rebel of Eden. By renewing the story of this ancient symbol of women’s resistance and autonomy, the artist brings it into a contemporary socio-political context.

Her works are held in both private and institutional collections.

Zuzanna is a co-founder of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Block and a board member of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

 Website: zuzannahertzberg.com
 Instagram: @zuzannahertzberg