“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”
