Studio Residency:
Jonathan Berger

The 2025 Studio Residency program will feature Jonathan Berger, an artist whose expansive projects often traverse space and time. Berger’s residency, titled Chapter One: Everything in Reverse, will present a handmade, scaled reconstruction of Kaunas, Lithuania, as the city existed in 1940, just before it came under Nazi occupation. The first attempt at an accurate model of the city from this pivotal moment, the piece will be based on a map made by the Russian-born, Lithuanian-based amateur cartographer Marija Oniščik. The model will be built on site over the course of the artist’s monthlong Studio residency by the community of craftspeople with whom Berger regularly collaborates. The process of assembly will be accompanied by a series of public programs that explore the personal relations and cultural histories prompted by the model.

The completed sculpture will serve as a major component of a forthcoming large-scale exhibition project, comprising a series of chapters that interweave multiple histories of diaspora and statelessness. For the last several years, Berger has researched these ideas within the context of the genealogies of his adoptive and chosen families, including the story of his mother, who as a young Jewish child was hidden by a Christian family in Kaunas during World War II. Berger’s choice to create the model is inspired in part by progressive Jewish ideas that permeated Eastern Europe before the war, as articulated in particular by the writing of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1945–2018), founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). As a teenage member of that organization, Berger worked alongside Kaye/Kantrowitz, whose theory of “diasporism” articulated a non-nationalist form of Jewish identity. This antiracist and multiculturalist view drew on concepts that were central to the pre-WWII Jewish Labor Bund movement, which was founded in Lithuania and advocated for a notion of homeland based not on state or religion, but on the idea of “making home where we are.”

Working collectively to build a replica of his mother’s home city, Berger creates an occasion to consider the ideas that emerged from that place so that we can return to them today. His residency at MoMA will include a series of public programs; details to be announced.

Organized by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Aminah Ibrahim, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs. 

Media and Performance at MoMA is presented through a partnership with Richard Mille.

Leadership support for the exhibition is provided by the Wallis Annenberg Director’s Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art, the Sarah Arison Endowment Fund for Performance, and the Julie A. Zoppo Fund for the Exhibition of Women Artists.