Yael Bartana Research Articles

The Redemption of Berlin’s Memory Landscapes: Yael Bartana’s Malka Germania

This article delves into the work of contemporary visual artist Yael Bartana, focusing on her recent artwork, the monumental video work Malka Germania (2021). Amidst the constant struggle over politics, commemoration, and territoriality in Berlin’s memory landscape, Bartana’s art emerges as a critical and thought-provoking intervention. By leaning on interviews with the artist, observations from exhibitions, as well as a thorough analysis of the video work itself, I propose an interpretation of Malka Germania as a radical rethinking of Berlin’s memory landscapes. I argue that the work not only reframes struggles over memory, but also materialises them as territorial struggles.

The Other Side of Hospitality: Migratory Aesthetics in Yael Bartana’s True Finn

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality.

Neurotic Fantasy: The Third Temple As a Metaphor in the Contemporary Israeli Art of Nira Pereg and Yael Bartana

In the political reality of Israel, some symbols lie at the heart of the political, religious, national, and historical discourse that characterize the peoples and cultures living on the Israeli-Palestinian soil. Among these, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the most complex and conflictual symbols. The multiple religious claims to the Temple Mount—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—are the subject of extensive study, but this article focuses on their reflection in contemporary Israeli art. In traditional Jewish art, the visual representations of the Temple or of Jews praying nearby expressed the longing of the Jews for generations to return to the Mount. In contrast, Yael Bartana and Nira Pereg view the multiple socio-political currents and religious rituals surrounding the Temple Mount as a reflection of the internal public debate regarding the face of the Israeli society today. This article discusses the contribution of their visual art to a conscious and aware discourse about the Israeli society and the underground currents that shape its contemporary identity. The analysis of their work tracks a “politics of aesthetics”—interpretation of the images within a socio-political context—and draws upon Israeli sociology, art history, and visual culture. In-depth personal interviews with the artists also inform the analysis.

Anti-fascism

This article stresses the need for an investigation into how the wounds of colonialism are treated in the West European public sphere. It uses a decolonial lens to look specifically at artistic actions in the form of both monuments and interventions in existing public space that reference European guilt around the genocidal crimes of colonial occupation and the Holocaust. In the course of the research it became clear that little comparative work has been done on the monuments to these two catastrophes. The article therefore serves more as an introduction to the reasons why the Holocaust and colonial violence might be brought into closer relationship with each other, arguing that establishing such a relationship through public art, among other sites of critique, can and should contribute to contemporary articulations of anti-fascism in Europe. The article looks at art monuments by Jochen Gerz and Hans Haacke in the 1980s and 1990s and laments the lack of similar responses to colonialism in the continent. It looks further at more recent anti-colonial and decolonial public actions and at a few artists, such as Yael Bartana, who do draw parallels between the Holocaust and other genocides. Finally, the article speculates on how future monuments might respond to a broader understanding of the causes of land occupations, slave labour, ethnic cleansing and mass murder by thinking about the colonial matrix of power as a common European epistemology that developed after 1492.

(Re)constructing Utopia

The union of art and politics has endured down the centuries, looking to the past, through memory, and to the future, through desire. The memory of what was or could have been provides a utopia to be celebrated or mourned, and since 1948 Palestinian and Israeli art has reflected on loss and gain, sacrifice and security, and presence and absence in the land. Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli art has converged, seeking peace, critical reflection and an acknowledgement of the impact of the years of unrest that has been borne by both sides, while technology has afforded a means to trace heterotopias in the spaces between possession and dispossession. Drawing on Luisa Passerini, Michel Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, this article maps the land, utopia and heterotopias in Israeli and Palestinian artistic practices, and explores the performativity of silence, loss and remembrance through the works of Sliman Mansour, Reuven Rubin, Tamam al-Akhal and Yael Bartana.

Spatial dialogues and Holocaust memory in contemporary Polish art: Yael Bartana, Rafał Betlejewski and Joanna Rajkowska

The paper analyses how the work of three contemporary artists deal with the memory of Poland’s pre-war Jewish population and the Holocaust. Joanna Rajkowska is one of Poland’s leading contemporary artists and her artworks have been displayed in prominent public sites in Warsaw. Her most famous work is her palm tree in central Warsaw, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (2002, ongoing), which references, in its form and physical location on Aleje Jerozolimskie, or Jerusalem Avenue, both Jerusalem and Warsaw’s vanished Jews. Rajkowska has also used important Jewish locations in Warsaw in other work, such as Oxygenator (2007). Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist, but represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2011. In her trilogy of films set in Poland, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2006-11), Bartana uses prominent locations in Warsaw in which to stage performances (the Palace of Culture, the National Stadium, site of the future Museum of Polish Jews) that provocatively posit a return of Jews to Poland. Betlejewski has authored several provocative and creative responses to the absence of Jews in contemporary Poland, such as his I miss you, Jew! project (2004), and his Burning barn performance (2010). The paper will examine the varying strategies through which these artists deal with the problem of the absence of Jews, the trauma of their violent disappearance, and attempt to re-inscribe the vanished Jews back into the landscape of contemporary Poland. The paper argues that all three artists use actual and imagined space in order to create a complex, often ambiguous dialogue between diverse traumatic pasts and the problems of the present. This text is published as a counterpart to the contribution to Disturbing Pasts from the artist Rafal Betlejewski.

The persistence of nostalgia? When Poles miss their Jews and Israelis yearn for Europe

The relevance of nostalgia and memory in the constitution of identity narratives of individuals and nation states is a well-documented phenomenon. Yet little is known about the function of nostalgia in the context of Israeli and Polish relations. The Holocaust experience has changed in dramatic ways how Jews and Poles relate to the category of nostalgia. In this essay Swetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘reflective nostalgia’ and ‘restorative nostalgia’ will serve as a starting point for a discussion about the function of nostalgia in the works of Israeli artist Yael Bartana and Polish artist Rafał Betlejewski, and about its role in facilitating the formation of new perceptions of the self and of the other and of new understandings of homelands.

Cur(at)ing History

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.

Yael Bartana and Post‐traumatic Culture: Utopian Reversibility and the Case of Polish National Melancholia

ABSTRACTMary Koszmary (2007) is one short film from a trilogy by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, which centers on the exhortations of a Polish radical politician calling for the comeback of three million Jews to Poland. This Polish trilogy focuses a lens, both artistic and psychoanalytic, on the place of the unbearable in the human psyche, reality which must be neither attended to nor acknowledged. The example of the unbearable and inassimilable which Bartana chooses is Poland's complicity and cooperation with the murder of her Jews. The Jewish genocide roughly seventy years ago involves inassimilable shame and guilt, defended against by national repression, denial and fetishistic dissociation. Bartana imagines a symptom in today's generation which both refutes and repeats the history enacted by their grandparents. Bartana assumes a deep‐set collective trauma manifesting bizarrely two generations later and conjures an unflinching picture of why failure to come to terms with and to mourn traumatic losses is relentlessly a problem in human history. The purpose of this paper is to explore the symptoms of the intergenerationally transmitted collective trauma as these symptoms translate from those of the individual traumatic condition in order to deepen our understanding of the effects of both individual and collective trauma when unresolved over time and particularly over generations. The first step toward healing is to acknowledge. Bartana's film sets up the opportunity for acknowledgment shining a clear cool light on so many modes of obfuscation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Loudspeaker and Flag: Yael Bartana, from Documentation to Conjuration

Previous articleNext article No AccessLoudspeaker and Flag: Yael Bartana, from Documentation to ConjurationVolker PantenburgVolker Pantenburg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Afterall Volume 30Summer 2012 Published by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667245 Views: 48Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2012 by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mischa Twitchin Chapter 7 Tadeusz Kantor: An Avant-Garde of Death, (Oct 2016): 237–303.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47872-6_8

Films polonais et images de la Shoah

Since 2000, following extensive debates on the “Jedwabne pogrom”, a proliferation of initiatives has demonstrated the will to dialogue with the Polish Jewish past in Poland and to confront the shadows of national history. As evidenced by the recent work of Alina Skibinski, films of the Polish Holocaust reflect the duty to remember the reality. An era of radical change is under way, as the film shows the work of Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who was selected to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2011. However, as suggested by the analysis of recent Polish documentaries and the TV series Time of honor, a fiction based on the Resistance in Warsaw during the occupation, which characterizes the degrading, if not negative image, of the Jew in his dealings in Polish society during the Holocaust. The film industry and national television remain in the background, compared to the work of historians as the works of Polish contemporary artists highlights the destruction of the Jews and Polish attitudes against the Holocaust when it comes to talking to the general public.

Next Year in Drohobych

In Israeli director Yael Bartana’s 2007 film Mary Koszmary—meaning “Bad Dreams” or “Nightmares”—a young Polish politician delivers a resounding speech to an empty, crumbling, communist-era Stadion Dziesięciolecia in Warsaw. The speech, he says, is an appeal: “This is a call. . . . It is an appeal for life. We want three million Jews to return to Poland, to live with us again. We need you! Please come back!” This article considers the powerful and perhaps disturbing premise of these lines and explores their possible meanings in a contemporary Polish context. What can it mean for Poles and Polish culture to need Jews—and in particular, to need those Jews who can never return? The complex phenomenon of Jewish memory in Poland and Eastern Europe cannot be contained within specific, present-day borders—whether of geography or of academic discipline: similar dynamics to those Bartana has identified in Poland exist throughout the region. Thus, against the background of Bartana’s film, the article considers the growing phenomenon and importance of local Jewish festivals in Poland and present-day Ukraine, focusing in detail on two specific festivals: the annual festival “Encounters with Jewish Culture,” held in Chmielnik, Poland, and the biannual Bruno Schulz Festival in Drohobych, Ukraine. The analysis explores ways that the memory of Polish Jews—and more specifically the figure of the absent Polish Jew—can function as a central element in the construction of new, communal Polish and Ukrainian narratives since the fall of Communism.

Nobody's property: art, land, space, 2000-2010

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams-Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alys, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Huner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.