Artists Sonya Schönberger and Christof Zwiener stayed with us at the Villa early June 2025 whilst on a research trip in Helsinki, visiting the Helsinki Biennial and other art institutions. Sonya is a Berlin-based artist whose practice deals with biographical ruptures against the backdrop of political or social upheaval. The source of her artistic exploration are the people themselves, who tell about it in biographical conversations. She created the ‘Berliner Zimmer’, a long-term video archive based on the stories of people in Berlin. Christof works with Berlin-specific aspects of public space such as transformation, displacement, densification, gentrification and the social and political influences on its perception. In doing so, he repeatedly uses the idea of overlapping times; for him, past, present and future are directly linked to an object, a situation, a building or a place. In recent years, his artistic practice has included curating projects with and in public space.
Learn more about the artists’ work at sonyaschoenberger.de and christofzwiener.de
Photo Joshua Cockroft