Moyra Davey | My Saints

With its project space, the Kestner Gesellschaft is establishing another new format. The space will mainly present films by international artists alongside the exhibitions. The first artist to be featured is Moyra Davey (*1958 in Toronto) from Canada, who works in photography as well as film and makes writing her artistic practice.

Moyra Davey’s films consist of loosely connected, moving images and contain personal narratives that resemble internal monologues. By relating her own experiences to those of well-known artists, writers, and philosophers, Davey’s films are also reflections on the nature of existence, thought, and the human condition. In the film My Saints (2014), for example, she asks her family and friends about The Thief’s Journal, the radical, semi-autobiographical novel by the French writer Jean Genet.

Davey studied at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California in San Diego. In 1989 she was accepted to the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Davey has had international solo exhibitions at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008), Kunsthalle Basel (2010), Tate Liverpool (2013), the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (2014), and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (2014). In 2017 she participated in documenta 14 in Athens. Moyra Davey lives and works in New York.