WE ARE HERE: Remembrance, Resistance, and the Public Space

Why It Matters

By documenting connective threads across far-right attacks and amplifying survivor voices, the project exposes institutional blind spots that hinder prevention and shapes public discourse and policymaking on counter-extremism and memorialization.

Summary

Artist and Halle attack survivor Talia Feldman presented We Are Here at the East Wing Biennial, unveiling a four-year, time-based digital mapping project that links the 2019 Halle attack to a global pattern of racially motivated far-right violence and online radicalization. The project centers survivors’ testimonies to reconstruct the day’s events and rebuke media and police narratives that foreground perpetrators and downplay racial motives. Feldman argues institutions have failed to acknowledge continuities between attacks, and her work aims to offer reparative narratives, public education, and a counter-memory to perpetrator notoriety. The piece is part of the Biennial’s Revision theme, interrogating who writes history and how art can destabilize dominant accounts.

Original Description

Talya Feldman in conversation with Romy Brill Allen

WIR SIND HIER (WE ARE HERE) first launched as a digital artwork by the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2022 and soon afterwards as a model project of the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Germany from 2022-2023. Today, WIR SIND HIER continues to claim spaces of remembrance in public space through the voices and demands of survivors and families of victims of racist and antisemitic violence.

WIR SIND HIER illustrates each family’s struggle for an active remembrance in their cities, the memories of those they have lost as they connect to space and place, and their political, social, and collective fight for a better future.

It invites viewers to imagine how remembrance, from city streets to monuments, could and should look today as an active form of resistance and change. By scrolling over the names of victims, users of the web platform can view maps of their cities and the spaces claimed or being claimed by families and initiatives today, and are given an overview of right-wing extremist attacks and police brutality in Germany and the former GDR within the last 40 years, including cases of violence that have not yet been properly investigated or recognized as hate crimes by state and local authorities.

WIR SIND HIER is a project by Talya Feldman under the auspices of the Network for Remembrance, Change, and Education (NEVA e.V.) in Munich.

Organised by East Wing Biennial Director Romy Brill Allen as part of the programming for RE:VISION, The 16th East Wing Biennial.

Speakers:

Talya Feldman is a time-based media artist from Denver, Colorado. She earned her MFA from the HFBK Hamburg and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through her intercultural and collaborative practice, Feldman generates social transformation through artistic projects that offer alternative and reparative narratives to violence. She has received global recognition for her works combating right-wing terror in cooperation with activist and research-based networks in Europe and abroad. Feldman has achieved numerous awards including: the 2026 Kunstfonds Stipendium, 2023 German Federal Prize for Students, 2022 Berenberg Award, 2021 DAAD Scholarship, and the 2021 DAGESH Prize.

Romy Brill Allen is the Director of the Courtauld Institute’s two-year long exhibition of contemporary art, the East Wing Biennial. She is a final year undergraduate student of History of Art with a particular interest in sexual politics and feminist art. She is a 2026 Peggy Guggenheim Collection Fellow. Romy is driven by her passion for storytelling and her belief in the potential of art to shape the world around us.