Born in Bremerhaven, I now live and work between Berlin and Sofia.

Influenced by her studies in political science at the Free University of Berlin, she focuses on our need for a home and the biographical ruptures in life that run contrary to this.

Before her artistic career, Gester worked for international aid organisations in the former Yugoslavia. This experience of the fragility of belonging combined with an increasing perplexity about the pictorial strategies of journalistic photography became the trigger for Gester's conceptual works.

Since the early 1990s, I have been on the trail of the systemic upheaval in south-east Europe. Particularly in Bulgaria, which resulted in the ‘Abandoned Promises’ series of works.

With my participatory series ‘Was bleibt’ ('Was bleibt'), I open up the radius and ask what remains when a person is forced to leave their home. With ‘Natura corporum’, I thematise the dissolution of our familiar habitats. Now I am expanding my view of the planetary dimension of humanity's home with works such as the installations ‘Joint Sharing’ and ‘verbunden’ ('bound') as well as the development of a hybrid form of photography.

My work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad and is represented in art collections such as the Edith Maryon Foundation, Basel, the Ruhr University Bochum, the German Historical Museum Foundation, Berlin and the Berlin City Museum Foundation.