With a painting process split between Berlin and her family’s home in New Jersey, Anna Berlin’s paintings are woven with stories from her family as well as recent developments from her independent research into her German-Jewish history. The paintings are a grayscale world where documentation, legal papers, and everyday ephemera become part of the storytelling language. The works use the monotone language of bureaucratic documents the artist relied on abroad, such as tax forms, proofs of identity, and various lists. This visual/verbal governmental speech was often fraught with confusion as she shares her last name with the city, creating reverberations in her imagination of past and present, self and family, and personal and cultural history.

Alongside the personal and legal papers, there is also the oral: intergenerational memories passed along in car rides or at the kitchen table in New Jersey. Names of people and places blur together—Wasser, Berlin, New York, New Jersey—as generations travel over water and land.