Inferno

Yael Bartana, Inferno, 2013, video still, courtesy of Petzel Gallery, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

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 deals with the impact of war, military rituals and a sense of threat on every-day life. Between 2006 and 2011, she was 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. Inferno (2013), a “pre-enactment” of the destruction of the Third Temple, True Finn (2014), came into being within the framework of the IHME Festival in Finland, while Pardes (2015) was shot during a spiritual journey in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Her latest work, Simone The Hermetic, is a site-based sound installation that takes place in future Jerusalem.

Yael Bartana (f.1970) studied at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, School of Visual Arts, New York and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She has received several international awards, and have been exhibited in solo shows at MoMA PS1 in New York, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Moderna Museet in Malmö, Philadelphia Museum of Art and held the Polish pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2011 among others. Yael Bartana lives and works in Amsterdam, Tel-Aviv og Berlin.