Yael Bartana

and Europe will be stunned

Yael Bartana’s films have been described as foreboding meditations on the identityforming rituals of Israeli society. The most recent portray her homeland’s predicament by taking us back in history and forward into an imagined future. As an artist she challenges her own people’s history and self-image, and as observers we are likewise challenged by the confrontation with imagery that is loaded with symbols and conflicting associations.

In a troubled borderland between reality, fiction, and propaganda, Yael Bartana weaves together the contrary movements that in different ways contributed to the founding of Israel: European antisemitism, colonialism, Socialism, and Zionism. The origins and development of Zionism are scrutinized in light of Israel’s political stance toward the Palestinians and the strongly socialist-inspired Zionism of the 1930s and 40s is juxtaposed with today’s opposition by leftist activists to the Israeli state. Documentation merges with propaganda and at a certain point we are geographically transported from Israel/Palestine to Poland, where a fictive movement, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, is emerging amid historical layers and reflections.

Each film is shown in its own building volume, referencing an architectonic aesthetic found in the films. The simple, barrack-like building masses might suggest the Jewish pioneer settlements in early 20th century Palestine or today’s Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. But they might just as well induce associations to activists’ temporary reconstructions of demolished Palestinian homes.

The entrance to the exhibition calls to mind the lobby of a movie theater. Posters for Bartana’s films adorn the walls and signal that we are moving through a landscape of shifting images in which documentation, staging, rhetoric, and idealization are used to capture both real and imaginary events.

Wildseeds

Against the backdrop of a clear blue sky, in a vast and magically beautiful mountain landscape, a group of youngsters appears, playing idly on the grassy hills. A sacred song, pervading the mountains and plains, establishes a spiritual relationship to the landscape.The film is set in the occupied West Bank and the youngsters are Israeli leftist activists playing the game “Evacuation of Gilad’s Colony”, inspired by clashes between Israeli security forces and illegal Jewish settlers. We see how the majority of the youths are intertwined in a great jumble, while a smaller number try to pull the group apart, separating arms and legs that are locked together, in order to break it up and remove it from the site. The idyllic scene soon takes on disturbing undertones and the atmosphere begins to oscillate between playful liberation and impending doom.

Summer Camp

Summer Camp documents the activities of the ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against
House Demolition) on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem. Activists from different countries gather together with Israelis and Palestinians to build up a demolished Palestinian home. Such reconstructions are conducted without official permission, and the house is not likely to stand for long. Their action is largely symbolic – a physical resistance to the occupation undertaken as a constructive activity.

Laboring together in solidarity in a sundrenched landscape, these activists recall the images of Jewish pioneers building homesteads in early 20th century Palestine. This visual connection is further strengthened as Bartana lets the groups hammering and nailing share soundtrack with Helmar Lerski’s 1935 Zionist propaganda film, Awodah, which is shown on the opposite side of the wall.
Awodah was produced in a time of growing anti-semitism and pogroms, with an ambition to encourage more Jews to emigrate to take part in building up a safe homeland for the Jewish people. Physical labor was seen as a means to spiritual and existential redemption, and the moral right to the holy land was considered to be deeply rooted in the cultivation of the land and the construction of a modern society. A similar moral significance attends the physical labor and construction in Summer Camp, but this time it takes the form of physical resistance made by Israelis and Palestinians alike and directed at the Israeli state.

A Declaration

The Israeli flag waves against a clear blue sky from atop a rocky outcropping, and as the camera zooms out we see a young man rowing a boat in the direction of the rock. The man has an olive tree with him in the boat and upon arriving at the rock he carefully rolls up the Israeli flag and plants the olive tree in its place.

We are just outside the harbor of Jaffa, a place from which many Palestinians fled
during the war following the founding of the Israeli state and which today has a mixed population of both Arabs and Jews. The rock is named after the mythological figure of Andromeda, who was to be sacrificed to atone for her mother’s boastfulness and thereby save her country from a terrible sea monster.

The film seems to connect this mythological tale with a destructive manifestation of nationalism, but the meaning is ambiguous. Exchanging the Israeli flag for an olive tree can mean to remove a national symbol in favor of a universal symbol of peace. But the olive tree is also a loaded symbol of Palestinian nationalism and thus the gesture can mean to replace one national symbol with another. As an integral part of the Israeli national emblem, the olive tree could also represent two nations, or two peoples in one nation.

Mary Koszmary (Nightmares)

We see a young man enter the Olympic Stadium in Warsaw. Wearing a white shirt and red tie, he ascends a small podium and gazes earnestly out over the stands. In a poetic but powerfully rhetorical speech he calls for three million Jews to come back to Poland. The camera pans over the empty stands. The grass and bushes that now grow there are a chilling expression of the absence of human life, but can also be read as a budding hope for future inhabitation.

The man at the podium is Sławomir Sierakowski, a left-wing activist and chief editor of the Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna. His speech touches on the heavy burden of historical guilt but also addresses the xenophobia and antisemitism in today’s Polish society. And while specifically speaking from a Polish perspective about Poles and Jews, his encouragements to embrace the Other seems directed just as much at Israelis and Palestinians.

His speech is a call for reconciliation, and it is permeated by great optimism. Nevertheless it evokes discomfiting emotions, as though the old dictum of history’s tendency to repeat itself could be heard whispered ominously between the lines. This Olympic Stadium – Dziesięciolecia Stadium – provided the stage for most of the party and state ceremonies in Communist Poland, and it recalls today Soviet propaganda of the Stalin era as well as Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic glorification of the Third Reich.

Mur i Wieża (Wall and Tower)

A group of men and women appear to have accepted Sierakowski’s invitation and are now in the process of building Poland’s first kibbutz. Dressed as Jewish pioneers, they are constructing the kibbutz as a Homa Umigdal – a type of prefabricated homestead developed and used during the Arab revolt of 1936–39 to allow Jews to take control of Palestinian territory. Homa Umigdal means “wall and tower” (or “stockade and guard tower”). The system comprised two parallel wooden plank walls, constructed like a concrete form but filled with gravel to create a protective barrier. The walls enclosed an area of about 35 by 35 meters, inside which a guard tower and four barracks were erected to house a group of about forty settlers.

In modern Warsaw, the construction stands out as a peculiar anachronism. Erected in the public square alongside the Monument to Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, it seems a foreign object, while at the same time making disconcerting allusions to the history of the site as part of the ghetto and the appaling event of 1940–43.

When the kibbutz is finished, a flag is raised that is designed as a hybrid of Polish and Jewish emblems. The scene is accompanied by the Israeli national anthem played backwards, as if to signal the reversal of an historic event. The young men and women all seem happy and harmonious. Nevertheless, barbed wire is wound around the plank walls as extra protection. Will the welcoming of a long gone neighbour be as warm as Sławomir Sierakowski promised?

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News 2010-05-20: Yael Bartana wins Artes Mundi prize

Yael Bartana, whose exhibition "and Europe will be stunned" opens at the Moderna Museet Malmö on May 22, has been awarded the prestigious Artes Mundi prize - one of the UK’s major art prizes.

Yael Bartana has been awarded the fourth Artes Mundi Prize for her oeuvre, which the judges said stimulates our thinking and understanding about what it means to be human. This was announced at a ceremony at the National Museum Cardiff yesterday. Artes Mundi Prize, established in 2003, is one of Britain's major art prizes and aims to provide a platform for contemporary artists established in their home countries but has previously received little critical recognition in the UK. The prize is 40 000 pounds.

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Welcome to the press preview on Wednesday, May 19, 10-11.30 am at Moderna Museet Malmö in the presence of Yael Bartana, Joa Ljungberg, curator, and Magnus Jensner, Director Moderna Museet Malmö. RSVP by May 18 to: s.alsterhag@modernamuseet.se