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At a time when inequalities, privilege, and systems of oppression are laid bare, the present feels like a crisis in perpetual motion. Political, ecological, and affective emergencies intersect with the erosion of shared language, producing a moment marked by rupture and disorientation. In such a landscape, the act of coming together — of making space for plural forms of knowledge and expression — becomes not only urgent, but transformative.
There’s a Crack in Everything brings together a group of artists whose practices question the stability of identity, territory, and belonging. Through gestures that are intimate or abstract, material or conceptual, these works challenge fixed meanings and reveal the porous, shifting contours of the self and the social.
The Jewish Museum of Belgium, standing between its past incarnation and a future reinvention, embraces this exhibition as part of its own transitory condition. The former museum building — once a residential house, a German school, a military prison, a warehouse for musical instruments — becomes an active participant in the project, its layers of use and memory folded into the present moment. This layered history resonates with the exhibition’s core impulse: to reflect on the ways in which human experience is shaped through relation, rupture, and repair.
In the face of increasing global polarization the Jewish Museum of Belgium reaffirms its conviction that art spaces must remain places where complexity is not silenced but welcomed. Rather than seek comfort or consensus, this exhibition asserts the museum’s responsibility to offer conditions where thought can unfold — spaces where disagreement is possible.
The title, borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s lyric — There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in — points to fragility not as failure, but as potential. Cracks are entry points: for light, for doubt, for renewal. In this spirit, the exhibition foregrounds vulnerability as a site of resistance and reimagining.