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Artist
Vera Gailis is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, video, installation, performance, and socially engaged art.
Her practice explores visibility through migration, identity, memory, and community, using archives, urban interventions, and digital tools to bring marginalized stories and bodies into view.
She works with personal and bureaucratic photographs, performative actions, and community-based projects to examine how presence is constructed, erased, or made perceptible in public space. Through these methods, she creates new forms of visibility for peripheral histories and lived experiences often pushed to the margins.
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Via Dolorosa 2025
performance in public space, Jerusalem
Via Dolorosa is a performative work exploring migration, visibility, and unequal belonging in Jerusalem’s charged public space. Carrying an enlarged image of her own immigration-certificate photograph through the Via Dolorosa, Vera Gailis turns a bureaucratic portrait into a public act of testimony, confronting the hierarchies of mobility and recognition embedded in Israeli society.
Addressed symbolically to the marginalized communities living and working along the Via Dolorosa, the performance reflects on discrimination shaped by the Law of Return, which grants immediate belonging to some while denying it to others. By moving through a route marked by religion, commerce, and historical weight, the work connects personal migration history with broader questions of privilege, exclusion, and the politics of visibility.
The House of Vera 2025
The House of Vera is an archive-based project about domestic memory, migration, and historical inequality.
Reconstructing the traces of her great-great-grandmother’s house in Ukraine through photographs, inherited objects, and performative research, Vera Gailis examines how personal archives carry the weight of war, ideology, and displacement.
Through this fractured domestic archive, the project reflects on unequal visibility in history: which homes are remembered, which are lost, and which lives remain legible through their objects. Situated between family memory and political history, The House of Vera turns the private house into a site for thinking about erasure, survival, and the fragile afterlife of belonging.
The house is black 2021
The House is Black is an intimate, community-based photography project
with a woman from the Sudanese refugee community in South Tel Aviv.
The photos are taken in the heart of her home, capturing the personal and private space she inhabits.Through the metaphor of my own wedding dress, I weave her story with mine, revealing her personal tragedies and the complex realities
of her life. The House is Black explores themes of identity, migration, and womanhood, inviting viewers to reflect on
the hidden narratives within domestic spaces.
Curator
As a curator, Vera Gailis develops exhibitions and cultural projects as part of her research-based practice.
Through curatorial work, collaboration with communities, and artistic inquiry, she produces knowledge on social issues and explores the role of art as a method of research. Her projects connect lived experience with public dialogue and critical reflection, and their outcomes are presented both in exhibition form and through international conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications.
Press
