The theme of the LABA Berlin 2022 Fellowship Exhibition is “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. 

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.

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.