Congratulations to Capitain Petzel artist Yael Bartana for her contribution to the German Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. Bartana has been invited by curator Çağla Ilk to co-represent Germany alongside artists Michael Akstaller, Robert Lippok, Ersan Mondtag, Nicole L’Huillier, and Jan St. Werner to navigate the verge, the gradation, the boundary under the title of Thresholds. Proceeding from alternative readings of history and the future, the contribution extrapolates realms of experience from the liminal.
With her ongoing work Light to the Nations, Yael Bartana approaches a threshold in time and space: the present reality of planet Earth on the brink of environmental and political destruction. In an act of salvation, a spaceship, envisioned by the artist and named after a passage in the Book of Isaiah, carries multiple generations of humans toward unknown galaxies. It is a grand, open-ended journey, designed for collective healing, drawing on utopian and dystopian elements in equal measure. With this installation, which includes a newly choreographed video work entitled Farewell, Bartana expands her body of work, developed over decades, exploring and reimagining group ceremonies and the social movements that surround them.
Overlaying speculative technologies with Jewish mystical doctrine, the Kabbalah, Bartana utilizes the ship as a vehicle of redemption. Without humans present to destroy it, Earth can recover, and without the restrictions of the land, new forms of societies can be designed on the ship.
While Light to the Nations is based on Jewish traditions, the grand endeavor transcends religious, ethnic, national, state, and tribal boundaries. It offers a future to all humanity, defying the planet’s gravitational pull and the human quest for belonging. By employing her method of pre-enactment, Yael Bartana sets Light to the Nations in the past as well as in the future, thus leaving visitors to the German pavilion in suspense of forgotten hopes.
The 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will take place April 20 to November 24, 2024.
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