Adam Broomberg (born 1970) is a South African artist, educator, and activist based in Berlin. Born in Johannesburg to a secular Jewish family of Holocaust survivors, he grew up under the apartheid regime in South Africa, a background that influenced his critical approach to state violence, surveillance, and visual culture.
For over two decades, Broomberg worked as part of the artistic partnership Broomberg & Chanarin (with Oliver Chanarin). Their collaborative work critically examined war photography, documentary conventions, and state archives. The duo received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013 for their publication War Primer 2 and the Arles Discovery Award in 2014. Their works are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Broomberg has also held teaching appointments, including a professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK).
Broomberg is an active member of Artists for Palestine UK and a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. In Germany, where public discourse surrounding Israel and anti-Semitism is tightly regulated, Broomberg has frequently critiqued state policy and cultural censorship. Following public accusations of anti-Semitism made against him by German official bodies, Broomberg responded in a 2023 interview: “For a commissioner of antisemitism, for his first and most vehement and powerful attack to be on a Jew and to put a Jew’s life and profession at risk, is totally ironic.“
In May 2023, Broomberg was briefly arrested by German police during a Jewish-led Nakba commemoration gathering in Berlin. In early 2024, he helped launch the “Strike Germany” campaign, calling on international cultural workers to boycott German state-funded cultural institutions over restrictions on pro-Palestinian speech. Additionally, he was an organizer within the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), which campaigned for the exclusion of the Israeli national pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.