Erika Nimis

artist and researcher

She holds degrees in contemporary history from Université Paris 1 (PhD), and in photography from France’s National School of Photography (Arles). Since 2005 she has been based in Montreal, where she is associate professor of Art History at the University of Quebec (UQÀM). As a photographer, since the mid-1990s, she developed a practice halfway between documentary and poetic essays. Her work explores traces of the past (particularly the 20th century) that are found in the present, especially among “invisible” people, places and things that have been forgotten, even erased from memories. A historian and photographer by training, Érika is currently working on a book about the story of her paternal grandmother, born in 1921 in the Chernihiv region of today’s Ukraine. This book combines text, archive images and photographs, to reconstruct the life of her grandmother who faced Stalinism in her youth, forced labour in Nazi Germany, and passed away in 1998 in France, far from her hometown.