Yael Bartana

With modern Jewish and European history as its background, the work of Israeli artist Yael Bartana is a visual art cavalcade and splicing-together of ideological currents and popular movements to which the 20th century stands as an often-tragic monument, created on a razor edge between fiction and reality. Yael Bartana (b. 1970 in Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) represented the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 with the work And Europe Will Be Stunned. She is an artist who digs deep at the point where she stands. Louisiana’s exhibition presents three of her films from 2007-2011. The works follows the genesis and triumphs of the art project "The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland" – a unique mixture of religious, political and nationalist endeavours played out between Israel and Poland – right up to the state funeral after the assassination of the leader of the movement. The pain, frustration and hope in Bartana’s films and photographs evoke a presence and a response that extend beyond immediate recognition – dealing of course with the situation of the Jews in the artist’s own Israel, but also extending into wider history here and now.

Louisiana Contemporary:
Yael Bartana