In Memoriam: Yishay Garbasz
We mourn the loss of Yishay Garbasz
“Going beyond the binary, going beyond the fixed idea”*
Yishay Garbasz was an artist and activist, a friend and a colleague. Over the past four years, she served on the Studio Advisory Board, which is appointed based on recommendations from the Professional Association of Visual Artists Berlin (bbk berlin) and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture. We valued her strong commitment, her sensitive understanding of the social circumstances of the applicants, and her sense of humour, which lightened the mood and made many a long meeting easier to bear.
Yishay’s contributions to the advisory board were inspiring and shaped by her deep engagement with the realities of artists’ lives. She initiated an anti-bias workshop and advocated for the advisory board to address issues of discrimination. Her aim was to make decision-making processes more conscious and to sharpen our awareness of structural inequalities. She has permanently changed our perception and strengthened our sensitivity to marginalised perspectives.
Yishay Garbasz worked with photography, video and installation. In her artistic practice, she explored memory, trauma, identity and political conflicts. Her work often drew on personal experiences, linked to questions of history, the body, gender and social exclusion. Her works have been exhibited internationally and have received widespread acclaim.
Her work can be understood as a practice of close observation: of the visible as well as of what is missing. She brought together different political and social contexts and demonstrated how physical and social boundaries shape perception, fear and belonging. Her work can be read as a form of resistance against normative notions of gender: as an insistence on complexity and as a way of making experience visible.
For Yishay Garbasz, art was a form of relationship: not controllable, but in flux. As an artist and a trans person, she understood her work and her life as a form of resistance.
Yishay’s work is unique and significant. Her artistic position has gained worldwide recognition. The responsible handling of her artistic estate is very important to us, and we wish to do everything we can to support this.
Her sudden death has affected us deeply and is a great loss to us.
Atelierbeirat 2022-2026: Lidiya Anastasova, Celina Basra, Michael Bause, Nuno de Brito Rocha, Nezaket Ekici, Karø Goldt, Franziska Harnisch, Eva Laufer, Layla Burger-Lichtenstein, Christian de Lutz, Matthias Mayer, Isabelle MeiffertIrina Novarese, Barbara Eitel, Alexandra Gaul, Lina Louisa Krämer, Dr. Luisa Seipp, Kathy-Ann Tan, Susanne Wehr, Andreas Wolf, Miriam Yammad und Claudia Zweifel
Atelierbüro: Birgit Nowack, Anna Fiegen, Jana Burkhardt, Julia Herold, Julia Brodauf, Lennart Siebert
A fundraiser has been set up in honour of Yishay Garbasz to give her a memorial service she deserves and to preserve her artistic legacy in the long term. Find the link to the fundraiser here: Spendenkampagne von Alison Hugill für Alex Hey: In Loving Memory of Yishay Garbasz
* Yishay Garbasz, ICRRA Conference 202