Born 1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel
Lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam
Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.
Under the title Thresholds, Bartana co-represents Germany alongside theatre director Ersan Mondtag at the Venice Biennale 2024. This is the second time Bartana is representing a country other than Israel in the Biennale, following the exhibition of …and Europe will be stunned as the official Polish participation at the 54th Biennale in 2011. Bartana was also awarded the Rome Prize of the Villa Massimo in 2023/24, where she was in residency in 2023/24.
In 2025 Bartana will present a solo exhibition at the North Norwegian Art Center, Lofoten, Norway. In 2024 the artist is holding solo exhibitions in Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen as well as in the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Further recent solo exhibitions include Center for Digital Art (CDA) in Holon (2023), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021/ 2018), Jewish Museum Berlin (2021), Fondazione Modena Arte Visive in Modena (2019), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (2017), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2014), Secession in Vienna (2012) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2012).
Yael Bartana‘s works are part of various permanent collections, such as Jewish Museum, Berlin, Tate Modern, London, Jewish Museum, New York, Guggenheim, New York and Abu Dhabi, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Magasin III – Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm and The German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art.