Entering the exhibition, Ioana Lungu’s A Place That Loves You Back evokes the intimacy of a traditional Balkan living room. On the TV set, a video work retraces the affective history of Ada Kaleh, a Romanian island once home to Muslim Sufis, which was sunk in the 1970s, the result of a state-led flooding project. The work speaks to displacement, diasporic longing, and the challenge of remembering histories of coexistence when their foundations have been deliberately erased.

Nimrod Astarhan’s Lighting the Same Fire engages another lost world: constructed of a series of solar panels in the shape of a Khazar sundial, the work casts light into the exhibition space, the energy’s irregularities resulting in startling and unpredictable patterns. Their work invokes the Khazars, the multiconfessional Jewish kingdom. This “technology of hope” questions whether the contents of a lost civilization can ever be harnessed and reborn.

A series of shelves climbing the wall addresses a different system of nature. Cory Tamler’s Liebe kleine Pankeis a series of walks spanning the length of the Panke River from its source in Bernau to its mouths in Berlin. Each shelf marks one of seven segments, the accumulated objects reflecting a process of sedimentation. A clay water carrier made collectively with the fellows represents a collaboration with Annabel Zoe Paran in which the artists staged a reimagining of the Tashlich, a ritual of atonement, on the first walk.

A woman sits at a table, a telephone held to her ear. In Hümeyranur Imamoglu’s portraits, the stark simplicity of the figures pushes back against their own minimization, insisting upon their wholeness. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the uncanny, her figures explore the unpredictable interplay between silence, projection, and self-possession.

Witness is a tall lightbox constituted of hundreds of fractalized images, each commemorating a Palestinian killed in Gaza by Israel, whose names Ruth Sergel has been collecting since 2014. Alongside it, The Worst Jew In Berlin gathers photographs, objects, stories, and images, which speak to the experience of being Jewish in Berlin and existing between crimes past and present. The two works are presented in states of deliberate incompletion, underscoring the ongoing nature of the loss.

One consequence of the ubiquity of atrocity is the impossibility of capturing it all. In Nazanin Bahrami’s You Have Seen This Before, news snippets are printed on long rolls of transparent paper, reminiscent of film strips. With each repetition, images fade and blur, until they dissolve altogether. The work probes the constant effort needed to stay present amid editorial bias, censorship, and algorithms that dull empathy and normalize detachment.

On the other side of the exhibition wall, Annabel Zoe Paran’s Desert Things interrogates the desert as both place and medium through a sand-cast relief. The sand becomes a physical embodiment of entropy—continuous, infinitesimal erosion—while also challenging the mythological origin between Jewish identity and the land.  

To the right, Farah Bouamar’s audiovisual installation To Speak of a Djibuk pulls upon the myths of the Djinn and Dybbuk, spirits from the Muslim and Jewish traditions. Moving between life and death, order and chaos, these spirits become projections of fears, desires, and hope for meaning. In her film, the dynamics are translated into movement, with fragmented images and voices in Arabic, Hebrew, and English creating a texture of dissonance.

In Guli Dolev-Hashiloni’s Bahnhof Bar, a collection of champagne bottles are accompanied by a detailed menu, with experimental descriptions of the wine. In this installation, he draws on his research into the brothels operated by Polish Holocaust survivors in Frankfurt. Out of chaos and unimaginable destruction, these bars offered Jews in postwar Germany a precarious path to autonomy.

Across from the bar rests a bridal veil. The veil is a prop for Nicole Wysokikamien’s performance, Lay All Your Love On Me, in which the wedding serves as both beginning and end, highlighting the potentiality embedded within religious ritual.

Downstairs, Mudassir Sheikh presents an immersive installation composed of white fabric, mosquito nets, spectral light, and soundscape, creating a chamber of mourning. The work weaves together myth and sonic warfare, evoking the drones that haunt conflict zones and the false genealogy spread under British colonial rule in South Asia, which claimed Pashtuns were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Both threads reveal a colonial logic whose vibrations extend to the lived experience of being Muslim in Germany today.

Together, the collection of works in the exhibition express the diverse artistic practices and cultural backgrounds within the fellowship. The works are not finished as much as captured in process, each containing the potential to continue long after the exhibition closes.

Mar’a’yeh (مرايه), the name of LABA Berlin’s interfaith program, initiated in cooperation between the Jewish Center Fraenkelufer Synagogue and the German Islam Academy, is a Levantine-Arabic word containing the Hebrew Mar’a (מַראָה) inside of it, both meaning mirror. Mar’a’yeh embodies the material and historical interconnectedness of Islam and Judaism, while also pushing back against how the two are often positioned to reflect off one another, flattened into monoliths and instrumentalized in opposition.

The false equality of the mirror offered a point of departure, allowing the fellows to push back against simplistic binaries and to insist upon the complexity of individual experience, identity, and dialogue. At a time when Muslim-Jewish can be falsely associated with Israel-Palestine, the artists rejected easy conflations, political symbolisms, and tokenizing readings. Instead, they embraced the prickly, bristling realities of true encounter. Entropy in itself has no moral valence: it points only towards the future. Our responsibility then is to hold onto the pieces and to find the possibilities within them.