“What if women ruled the world?” Yael Bartana stages the question in her performative ‘Two Minutes to Midnight,’, where an all women government of a fictitious country must take a stand on an imminent nuclear threat from a foreign nation. A panel of fictional characters and real women experts in fields such as defence, law, politics and psychology is set in a democratic ‘Peace Room’, mirroring the toxically masculine ‘War Room’ in Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War satire, ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ The women are tasked with deciding how to approach the prescripted situation. Bartana’s visionary work is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary four-year process that analyses the geopolitical power game – and presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse.

The footage emerged from the recordings of the hybrid-experimental live performance What if Women Ruled the World? in Aarhus and Berlin (2017 and 2018) And the performance “Bury Our Weapons not Our Bodies” (Philadelphia 2019).