Amid a decade-long resurgence of far-right nationalism in Europe and Israel, Yael Bartana (*1970) has gained international acclaim for video, sculpture, and photography that cuts across the cultural production of personhood and national identity. Her video trilogy “And Europe Will Be Stunned” (2007–11) immerses viewers in the visual language of redemptive nationalism, crafting a narrative around a fictional “Jewish Renaissance Movement” in Poland. The film installation Malka Germania (2021), meanwhile, revisits the historical sites of Berlin’s postwar Erinnerungskultur (memory culture) and their resonances with contemporary debates on Israel-Palestine. Most recently, she opened half of the German Pavilion in Venice (alongside theatre director Ersan Mondtag) with Light to the Nations (2022–24), an eerie, polished multimedia installation about a Kabbalistic spacecraft traversing the cosmos, clothing Jewish messianism in the aesthetics of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. As earthly calamities and political dead ends pile up, Bartana’s work looks to space for a way out – before troubling the very basis of exodus.
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