Yael Bartana: Yael Bartana: Let there be light

“Utopia Now!” is the title of the solo exhibition by the artist Yael Bartana, which can currently be seen in the Weserburg in Bremen. It’s an irritating title: seemingly hackneyed, but at the same time strange for our time, a time without perspective, a time without a future. It is a time of managing misery, a time of trench warfare. It seems to be a time of restoration, not departure. The only utopia today would be to believe that things wouldn’t get any worse. At this year’s Venice Biennale, Bartana and Ersan Mondtag are showing the film installation “Light to the Nations”, in which humanity leaves the earth in a spaceship so that the earth can recover.

In the Weserburg, Bartana shows film installations and wall reliefs made from fluorescent tubes. Some works are dedicated to the creation of a better, messianically redeemed world. The titular tube image is a red-hot, collapsing lettering. It is difficult to say whether what is being asserted here is the failure or the urgency of a utopian idea.

Another relief shows angels sawing up a swastika. Sometimes the angels light up, sometimes the swastika, then both together. A perhaps somewhat simple and decorative anti-fascist action.

The messianic intervention of the artist herself could look like the one in her animated short film from 2010, the oldest work in the Bremen exhibition. Here she saves “war cripples,” characters from a picture that Otto Dix painted in 1920. It showed wounded soldiers of the First World War in caricature, with tattered faces, eye patches and prostheses, hooks instead of hands, wheels instead of legs. The picture was confiscated during the Degenerate Art campaign in 1937 and remained missing even after the end of National Socialism. As a 16-millimeter film, the wounded war veterans are now back, multiplied into a huge, ghostly squad.

Not everything is so simple in the work of the artist born in Israel in 1970. In 2011 she became known to a wider audience with her film trilogy on the “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland”, which she showed in the Polish pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The work claims the return of Polish Jews, most of whom fled to Israel. The episode entitled “Wall and Tower” tells the story of the founding of a kibbutz on the former site of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is already clear here that making amends for history is hardly conceivable. Although the Zionist settlement project in Poland has a certain historical comprehensibility, history has also progressed in Warsaw in recent decades. Where the ghetto used to be, something has changed for a long time now. History is a merciless process that constantly rewrites everything. This meeting of fantasy and aporia is a great strength of this work.

“Malka Germania,” which Bartana produced in 2021 for her exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Berlin and which can now also be seen in the Weserburg, is also about such a just Jewish settlement project. On three oversized screens we see troops of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) conquering Berlin. With an Israeli flag over their shoulders, the soldiers walk up the stairs to the Reichstag, walk through the streets, and cover the German street signs with Israeli ones. Everything German flies out of the upper window of a Berlin apartment building: beer mugs, Biedermeier chairs, an entire Reclam library and a framed portrait of Martin Luther. These scenes were shot in the Mitte district of Berlin. It is not without reason that they are reminiscent of the images of anti-Semitic pogroms. Bartana does not reverse the perpetrators and victims, but she does confuse the attributions.

The title of the exhibition at the time was “Redemption Now”. The Jewish conquerors get what is rightfully theirs. The world spirit accompanies them: an ethereal figure, superior to age and gender, but riding on a donkey. Actually there is nothing to conquer in Bartanas Berlin. There is no one to oppose the IDF, and there is almost no one left in the capital of this aging country. There are people standing on a train platform that resemble a refugee track. Although they wear today’s clothes, they also have wooden-clad suitcases like those from the early 20th century. Are they fleeing Berlin or are they coming to repopulate it? The mood among the travelers seems relaxed.

Similar to the work in Venice, here she combines the Zionist narrative with the pure, athletic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl. At the end, Albert Speer’s Germania appears in front of the bathers’ eyes from Wannsee, with a swastika on the cathedral dome. This work is so aesthetically strange that it can’t really be classified politically either.

This is particularly evident today, after the Hamas massacre and during the IDF’s Gaza operation. The tensions within the art scene are particularly strong. It is significant for Yael Bartana that she was largely spared from anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian protests during the opening ceremonies of this year’s Venice Biennale. The protests were directed against the pavilion as a representation of the Federal Republic, which is resented for its support of the Jewish state, but not against the artist who used it.

Until November 24th 2024 in the Weserburg – Museum for Modern Art, Bremen