Yael Bartana

Please join us for a lecture by Yael Bartana, marking the opening of the exhibition Love in a Mist (and the politics of Fertility), which will be on view in the Druker Design Gallery from October 28 – December 20, 2019. The lecture will be followed by a reception in the gallery.

Yael Bartana’s films, installations and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like “homeland”, “return” and “belonging”. Bartana investigates these through the ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state.

In her Israeli projects, Bartana dealt with the impact of war, military rituals and a sense of threat on every-day life. Between 2006 and 2011, she has been working in Poland, creating the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, a project on the history of Polish-Jewish relations and its influence on the contemporary Polish identity. The trilogy represented Poland in the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice (2011).

In recent years Bartana has been experimenting and expanding her work within the cinematic world, presenting projects such as Inferno (2013), a “pre-enactment” of the destruction of the Third Temple in São Paulo, True Finn (2014), that questions the national Finnish identity, Simone The Hermetic, a site-based sound installation which takes place in future Jerusalem, and Tashlikh (cast off), a visual meditation that gathers personal objects linked to horrors of the past and the present. Her latest work, What If Women Ruled the World is an experimental performance which combines fictional settings and real life participants, setting up a particular forum for action while exploring possible alternatives to a world dominated by men.