What if women ruled the world? Yael Bartana stages this question in her performative piece "Two Minutes To Midnight": The all-female government of a fictional country is asked to take a position on an acute nuclear threat from a foreign nation. A panel of actresses and real-life experts in defense, law, politics and psychology are in a democratic "peace room". This reflects the toxic male "war room" in Stanley Kubrick's classic satire "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" about the Cold War. The women must decide how they want to deal with the explosive situation.
Bartana's visionary work is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary four-year process that analyzes the geopolitical power game - and presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse. The footage is based on 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 2018).
In monumental video installations, Yael Bartana creates multi-layered reflections on the present of history. She experiments with the visual language of power and propaganda, pushes their limits and deliberately reinterprets traditional paths of association. Alternative presents and disturbing future scenarios emerge. For the presentation in the interim building VS of Villa Stuck, she accepted the invitation to juxtapose one of her video works with the turbulent history of the building at Goethestrasse 54. During the Nazi era, the building housed the Pension Patria, a forced accommodation facility for Jews on their way to deportation. "Two Minutes To Midnight" brings the historical context into the present and asks: What political future do we want to create?
Curated by Dr. Helena Pereña
An Artist Talk with Yael Bartana will take place at October 8.
For more information, click here.
