“Mar'a'yeh: A Night’s Journey ” [2024]
LABA Berlin has partnered with the Deutsche Islam Akademie (DIA) for its groundbreaking Muslim-Jewish art residency program: Mar‘a’yeh. Marayeh (مرايه) the Levantine Arabic word for mirror harbors within it the Hebrew word with the same meaning: Mar’a (מַראָה). Together they form an infinity mirror; the words are inseparable, yet their connection is invisible to undiscerning eyes. Mar‘a’yeh perceives art as a mirror reflecting the multifaceted essence of society without simplifications, dissections and categorizations. Our Marayeh, Mar’a on the wall does not tickle our vanity. Rather, it reflects our flaws and beauty while unveiling the complexities and predicaments of human experience. Mar‘a’yeh aims to challenge perceptions of Jewishness and Muslimness in German society, spark dialogue, and ultimately foster empathy.
Keeping with LABA tradition, an annual theme forms the focal point for study, conversation and creation. 2024 theme was “Night”. LABA fellows had to explore the theme of Night in the Jewish and Islamic canons and in the lives of creatives. They had to look at how and why Night anchors, liberates, and terrifies us. Through a study of evocative stories of epic nights from Islamic and Jewish scriptural heritage, they had to examine the mystery of Night with its fantasies, eroticism, and mysticism that often dissipate at dawn. Sessions led by alternating pairs of Jewish and Muslim scholars will juxtapose Jewish and Islamic texts to explore the plurality of lived Muslimness and Jewishness, enabling scrutiny of one's own traditions and gaining familiarity with those of others.
The program was a cooperation with Künstlerhaus Bethanien—an international cultural center in Berlin-Kreuzberg dedicated to the advancement of contemporary visual arts and encouraging critical reflection on subjects related to contemporary art and culture. An equal number of Jewish- and Muslim-identifying fellows were benefiting from a supportive ecosystem providing creative direction, close readings with renowned Jewish and Muslim scholars, reflection workshops on contemporary discourses in Germany, and a network of international creatives. The program had provided an opportunity for an ongoing and stimulating intellectual exchange as well as resources for the realization of a creative project connected to 2024´s theme Night.
“TABOO” [2023]
The theme of the 2023 LABA exhibition is Taboo. Over the past year, eight fellows came together to study texts taken from the Jewish canon, trace the practical and theoretical implications of taboo restrictions, and interrogate the power and danger in boundary-breaking. In the process, they conceived of work that reflected the position of Jewish life in Germany, exploring the composition of Jewish identity, the politics of memorial practices, and the nature of fetish and desire. The artists planned an exhibition that asks: do taboos reveal more about the transgressor, or the context of transgression?
“BROKEN” [2022]
The theme of the LABA Berlin 2022 Fellowship Exhibition was “Broken.” Featuring 8 artists representing a diversity of Jewish identities and artistic practices, the works on display pull from literature, opera, film, psychoanalysis, mythology, disability studies, and personal experience. They take history, real and imagined, to explore the rocky, recursive, and often disjointed path from breaking to recovery after trauma. Some artists engage with the moment of rupture, some interrogate the promise of reparation and repair, while others explore the shapes of the broken pieces.
The works on display suggest that not every break can be repaired, nor does it need to. Instead, brokenness introduces a negative capability: to work with what we have, to trace the shape of our own jagged selves.
Broken follows 2021’s Chosen, which offered its own explorations of isolation, suffering, and fracture. If Chosen confronted the impossibility of perfect equality and democracy, then Broken offers a vantage point to interrogate the myth of and longing for wholeness.
“CHOSEN” [2021]
LABA Berlin’s 2021 Fellowship exhibition was themed “Chosen”. A group of 8 artists of varied connection to the Jewish culture, we present an exploration of duality chosen-ness and choice. By spring their paths and the works they are creating, they will explore and expand our notion of what I means to be chosen or not, and what constitutes the act of choice. Amidst a global pandemic and instability, strife and division, we look to our ancestors who lived through plagues and wars, harmony and brutality, and take refuge in tier prescient teachings, humanity, and discord.
Join us in plumbing the depths of our imaginations as we engage with chosenness and choice, one of the most sustainability and time-tested aspects of the Jewish identity; as Groucho Marx opined, “I refuse to join any club that would [choose] me as a member”
