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.