Sharone Lifschitz (b. Beer Sheva, 1971) grew up in Kibbutz Nir Oz. She trained as an architect at the Architectural Association and the Cooper Union. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and a PhD from the University of East London (UEL).

She is the co-director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Production (CCP) at UEL, where she teaches Fine Art and is a senior tutor for the Creative Documentary by Practice MFA at UCL.

Lifschitz’s work is propelled by a curiosity about people and a belief in the sanctity of conversation. For the past 25 years her practice has sought to negotiate personal and collective memory and trauma within public space, producing films, text-based objects and urban-scale interventions that emerge from encounters, conversations and friendships. Her practice pushes the boundaries of participation and co-creation, and makes an essential contribution to debates on nationalism, borders, mobility, identity, collective memory and amnesia.

Her seminal prize-winning Speaking Germany (2007), commissioned for the inauguration of the Jewish Museum in Munich, captures an oeuvre informed by encounters and conversations that trace the shape of collective and personal memory, amnesia and trauma in everyday occurrences, public discourse and space. Lifschitz’s JMM survey show in 2014 included Advice about Sharing a Country (2010-13, Wallonie/Flanders, Belfast) and work made in Germany, Israel and the UK. Her film The Line and the Circle, in collaboration with her mother Yocheved Lifshitz, won the Israel Museum Adi Prize in 2010.

Her film The Visitor (2019) marks a collaboration with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Wang Shu in a filmic exploration of Shu’s Ningbo Museum of History. Negotiating personal and collective memory, the film offers the museum’s construction narrative and presence as an unofficial memorial to China’s colossal peacetime destruction.

Her new film, for which she has been awarded the 2024 Rappaport Prize, begins with a wish to recreate the archive of her father Oded Lifshitz. Oded (84), a journalist and peace activist, was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, along with her mother Yocheved, a photographer and peace activist, who was subsequently released from Hamas captivity.

Her film combines her father’s writing, archival footage of Kibbutz Nir Oz, and a family archive comprised of Yocheved’s stills and dozens of hours documented by Sharone Lifschitz over twenty years, and since October 7.

“My parents’ entire life’s work was burned. The idea of rebuilding the archive, a life’s work of ideas, the love of place and humanity – that’s where the film begins,” she says.