NAC Library Talks: Liza Prins on Otti Berger

Published on Monday, 16 December 2019 13:09
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Otti Berger at the loom, 1928. Photographer unknown. Yamawaki Iwao & Michiko Archives.
 
NAC Library Talks in Nida: on Wednesday, December 18th at 18h at NAC library with Liza Prins, artist and researcher currently in residency at NAC. 
 
Liza Prins will speak about her ongoing work Otti, that takes the form of a non-fiction mini-novel. The novel narrates the life of Otti Berger, a weaver of the Bauhaus in Dessau, who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
 
The novel celebrates Berger's artistic and innovation-based weaving practice, while also illuminating the sometimes conflicting position of women at Bauhaus and the anonymity in their work, that both defeminized their labor, but also engendered another level of feminization in its association with anonymous textile production.
 
While drawing from archival material and both employing and destabilizing the methods and language that characterize non-fiction work, the novel fills gaps in the knowledge about Berger's life, including other material and fictional parts in relation to Prins’ artistic practice. The friendship, or more than friendship, between Otti Berger and Anni Albers forms a red thread through the story and an alternative ending is created when Berger does not die in Auschwitz, but instead lives on in her native village of Vörösmart in current-day Croatia.
 
 
Liza Prins is an artist, researcher and writer based in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the reinterpretation and revaluing of material practices that are often coded as feminine. Such topics have brought Prins – in both her tangible and written work – to the concept of the “messy girl”, which she deploys to embody the post-humanist subject.
Prins’ works have been shown, among others, in Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam (2017), Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2016), Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn (2016), and Roger Brown Study Collection, Chicago (2012).