Julia Cimafiejeva: ich zerschneide die Geschichte
- daadgalerie
- Reading
- Talk
11.11.2025 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Julia Cimafiejeva
Book Launch with poet Julia Cimafiejeva and her translator Tina Wünschmann and publisher Regelindis Westphal
What remains when a life is torn from its familiar order? Belarusian poet and translator Julia Cimafiejeva left her homeland in 2020 for political reasons. In Hamburg, in 2024, she began creating paper collages—what started as play became serious; cuts turned into metaphors. For exile means being cut out by the scissors of history. The collages, assembled from old books and magazines, piece together a new world through absurd compositions. They are accompanied by short poems that offer no explanations, only clues—poetic hints of a fragmented identity searching for new meaning. A deeply personal and artistically engaging work about exile, loss, and the fragile act of reassembling one’s own story.
Julia Cimafiejeva, born in 1982, is a Belarusian writer and translator. She has published poetry collections in Belarusian, which have also appeared as separate books in the USA, Germany, and Poland. Her works have been included in various Belarusian and international projects, anthologies, and journals. Her English-language documentary book Minsk Diary has been translated into six languages. For the project While History Writes Itself at the Maxim Gorki Theater, she wrote her debut play Extremists, which was performed in Germany and Poland. For her translation of a poetry collection by Stephen Crane, she received the Carlos Sherman Translation Prize. Since 2020, Julia Cimafiejeva has lived in exile in Europe. In 2025, she became a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
daadgalerie
Oranienstraße 161
Berlin-Kreuzberg
Free admission