There’s a Crack in Everything — 5.09 – 14.12.25
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 fracture and disorientation.
There Is a Crack in Everything brings together more than 25 international artists whose practices bridge notions of beauty, form, sensuality, and touch with urgent questions around identity and territory. Their works challenge fixed meanings and reveal the porous, ever-shifting contours of the self and its environment by applying a highly diverse spectrum of artistic languages.
Today, the Jewish Museum of Belgium stands between its past incarnation and a reinvention in progress. Completely emptied, its galleries stripped bare, it awaits uncertain reconstruction. This state of suspension resonates beyond our particular circumstances: it reveals how a moment of pause opens the way to new possibilities. As an expanded exhibition format, this project will unfold as a perpetual conversation by contemporary artists with and beyond the building and its multiple histories.
The building itself — private house, German school, military prison, warehouse for musical instruments — has undergone multiple reinventions forged by historical circumstances. Today, in this phase of waiting, it is clear that what emerges cannot simply restore what was. This moment of pause becomes a metaphor for how fracture gives rise to new perspectives.
The title, borrowed from Leonard Cohen — “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” — suggests that the fissure is not only destructive but also generative. Cracks become spaces where new forms of thought can emerge, where certainties waver.
The artists gathered here explore situations of fracture. They offer no easy consolation or definitive answers but ways to inhabit uncertainty with intelligence and courage. In the empty galleries, absence becomes a medium; indeterminacy, a creative material.
This exhibition is an integral part of the museum’s transitional condition and affirms fragility as a lucid acknowledgment of the precarious ground on which all cultural institutions now stand.
This project is organized by the Jewish Museum In/Out and its director, Barbara Cuglietta, in collaboration with invited curator Martin Germann.