ART CITIES:Berlin-Yael Bartana
Yael Bartana is a video artist who explores the imagery of cultural identity. In her photographs, films and installations Bartana critically investigates her native country’s struggle for identity. Her early work documents collective rituals introducing alienation effects such as slow-motion and sound. In her recent work the artist stages situations and introduces fictive moments into real existing narratives.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jewish Museum Berlin
Yael Bartana in his solo exhibition “Redemption Now” investigates the power of imagination and art’s redemptive potential. For more than twenty years, Bartana has been inquiring into grand historical narratives that help to constitute national and other collective identities. The show brings together more than fifty early and more recent works, including video installations, photographs, and neon works. The exhibition follows an eschatological topos (the recurring idea that a leader may bring salvation) and its deconstruction. At the core of the exhibition is the commissioned video work “Malka Germania” (Hebrew for “Queen Germania”), which Bartana conceived for the Jewish Museum and produced at historically charged locations across Berlin. An androgynous savior figure comes to the German capital. Her journey floods the city with scenes from an imagined collective unconscious; past and future merge in an alternative present. The installation’s theme of collective redemption addresses traumata, hopes of salvation, and the desire for change. In “Degenerate Art Is Alive” (2010) Yael Bartana animates the figures from Otto Dix’s 1920 painting War Cripples into a crowded, squeaking and clomping procession. After the First World War, Dix made drawings of protesting veterans who were demanding state recognition of their service. During the Nazi era, Dix’s works were labeled as “degenerate” and banned. The painting “War Cripples” was destroyed and exists only in print. In Bartana’s animation, the old heroes come to life as surviving artworks. The film calls upon viewers to join the procession, to transform strength into vulnerability, answers into questions, and convictions into art. Notions of salvation can be dangerous, as they oversimplify things. The prospect of redemption promises a solution to all problems, an attitude diametrically opposed to the study of scripture and religious texts in Judaism with its process of incessant questioning. The study room is a place for rising above ignorance and stereotypes. The neon sculpture “What if Women Ruled the World“ prompts visitors to contemplate imagination and questions of personal responsibility in society. Surrounded by Yael Bartana’s self-portraits in various personas, you are invited to read the exhibition publication, which adopts the polyphonic method of the Talmud, the core text of rabbinical Judaism. With “Abracadabra”, created during the pandemic, Bartana points to the relationships between science and superstition, modernity and mysticism. Memorials and performance projects by the artist are presented on tablets. The “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland” (JRMiP) is Bartana’s most famous complex of artworks. It consists of the video trilogy “And Europe Will Be Stunned”, which was Poland’s contribution to the 2011 Venice Biennale. In 2012, an international convention was held, the First Congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), as part of the Berlin Biennale. In addition, an abundance of objects, graphics and merchandise accompanied the project at various exhibition venues. The JRMiP seeks to encourage the return of Jews to Poland, applying an open-ended definition of Jewishness. This vividly demonstrates some of the ways Bartana probes the effects of reality and fiction, past and present, propaganda and art. The display of JRMiP memorabilia alongside the primary video art self-referentially stages the JRMiP as a museum exhibit, placing this imaginary political movement into a kind of reality.
Photo: Yael Bartana, Malka Germania (film still), 2021, three channel video and sound installation, 43 min, Commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin, © Yael Bartana, Courtesy the artist and Jewish Museum Berlin
Info: Curators: Dr. Shelley Harten and Dr. Gregor H. Lersch, Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstr. 9–14, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 4/6-10/10/2021, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, www.jmberlin.de
