Sonya Schönberger works with installation, video, photography and text, exploring material and immaterial archives, personal memories and biographical accounts. Her triptych ‘Skull and Heart’ places a self-portrait between two close-up photographs of stones – one shaped like a skull, the other like a heart – resting in the artist’s hand. Found at the water’s edge and riddled with lava veins, they convey a grounded, primordial force and serve as companions that testify to personal experience. In the central image, Schönberger lies on the ground in the garden among ferns and lush scenery that looks almost tropical. With a mask of moss over her face and a chain of dried mud around her neck, she is looking at the viewer without being properly recognizable. As an ancient, plant-like cryptogam that grows in all directions without a solid base, the moss embodies adaptability and persistence.

Sonya Schönberger is a Berlin-based artist whose practice engages with biographical ruptures and individual narratives of memory against the backdrop of political, societal, and social upheavals. At the centre of her work are people themselves: in extensive biographical conversations, they speak about personal experiences, losses, transitions, and new beginnings that are closely linked to historical events. These narratives form the basis for artistic archives. She works both with archives she has built herself and with pre-existing, partly found archives, which she recontextualises and integrates into her practice. In 2018, she initiated the project ‘Berliner Zimmer’, a long-term video archive based on the personal narratives of people in Berlin. The project understands itself as an open, growing archive of urban biographies and reflects the complexity of the city as well as its historical and present transformation processes.