Speakers: Moyra Davey in conversation with Marta Kuzma
Venue: Jam Factory Art Center, Auditorium, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street, Lviv
As part of The Chalk Circle, the public program of the Stammering Circle exhibition, this event features a screening of Les Goddesses (2011), followed by a conversation between artist Moyra Davey and curator Marta Kuzma.
Set largely in the artist’s New York apartment, Les Goddesses draws connections between Davey’s familial experiences and the life of 18th-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters. Blending voice-over, personal archive, and literary reference, the film explores themes of motherhood, loss, memory, and the creative process — charting a movement from private reflection to public form.
The conversation will consider Davey’s method of working across photography, film, and writing; her engagement with feminist and literary history; and the generative tension between exposure and concealment in autobiographical practice. In line with the broader concerns of The Stammering Circle, this dialogue reflects on how artistic forms register conditions of displacement, testimony, and the negotiation of fractured historical narratives, as well as on Davey’s new commission Four [чотири], now on view as part of the exhibition.
Four [чотири] connects the lives, work, and artistic legacies of four figures of Ukrainian descent — Paul Celan, Peter Hujar, Clarice Lispector, and Maya Deren. Rooted in a written text performed by Davey and spoken in translation by filmmaker Lyuba Knorozok, the work unfolds as a meditation on biography, language, and historical reverberation. Much of the film takes place in New York’s Riverside Park, a narrow green stretch along the Hudson River filled with everyday sociability, movement, and rest. In this urban refuge, Davey locates subtle echoes of the stories she narrates — gestures of dance, fragments of music, silence, work ethic, and even hair — woven through the lives of her subjects.
Moyra Davey is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York. Since the mid-2000s, the moving image has become central to her practice, with essay films that blend personal narrative, voice-over, and reflections on literature and philosophy. Her acclaimed video Les Goddesses (2011), and its follow-up Hemlock Forest (2014), explore themes of motherhood, memory, and historical biography through the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters. Davey’s films often draw on her own writing, as well as on the work of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Jean Genet, and Virginia Woolf. She is the author of several books, including Long Life Cool White (2008), Burn the Diaries (2014), and Index Cards (2020). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tate Liverpool, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Whitney Biennial, and is held in the collections of major institutions such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Marta Kuzma serves as the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Faktura 10. Currently a tenured Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art, Professor Kuzma was the first woman to be appointed Dean in the institution’s 150-year history, a position she held between 2016 and 2021. Previous to her deanship, Professor Kuzma was the Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2014–2016). From 2005–2013, she was the Director of the Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) in Norway, where she led a research-based educational and exhibition program. In the early 1990s through to 2000, Kuzma founded and directed the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, during which she also established the SCCA Gallery at the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1994. During this time Kuzma curated many projects, including Alchemic Surrender in Crimea (1994) and Boris Mikhailov’s first international retrospective (1996). At the start of her professional career, Kuzma led the international exhibitions program at the International Center of Photography in New York under Cornell Capa. She has curated many international exhibitions, including co-curating Manifesta 5 in San Sebastián. She has also authored numerous publications, the most recent of which is History of an Art School (2022), the first published history of the Yale School of Art. Kuzma is a graduate of Barnard College, and a postgraduate in aesthetics and art theory from The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London.
The screening and conversation will be held in English, with Ukrainian subtitles and simultaneous translation available on site.