The artist’s show at Gammel Strand, Copenhagen explores historical memory, and the slipperiness of nationhood and belonging Things to Come, featuring works from 2008 to 2023, opens with a wall of screens showing a single image: the seven-minute Zukunftsbewältigung (Overcoming the Future) (2023), whose title inverts the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, German for coming to terms with the past. Three figures dance in slow motion on a patch of grass in the dead of night, backs to each other, distant light illuminating their diaphanous white gowns and their horse, ram and donkey masks. A distorted choral chant echoes as they rise and slump, as if Bartana is choreographing some ritual – a shaking off of the past and a readying for the future.
Born in Israel, Bartana studied art in Germany and since the mid-2000s has lived between Berlin and Amsterdam. Her exploration of historical memory, and the slipperiness of nationhood and belonging, is inextricable from her background. The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection (2008) recreates photos by Herbert Sonnenfeld, who documented the influx of Jews to Palestine from the early 1930s onward. These images of ruddy young Zionists tilling the earth to establish the nation of Israel became a powerful part of its imagination; Bartana recast Sonnenfeld’s subjects with contemporary Palestinians and Mizrahim (Jews from Muslim-majority countries). She revisits this body-replacement tactic elsewhere, a trickster inhabiting others, reminding us that the narratives and iconography of history are always being rewritten and reshaped: Stalag (2014/15) sees her dressed up as an SS officer holding a film camera back at us, threatening while documenting. In Herzl (2015) she dresses up as (a quite handsome) Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, whose specious slogan ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’ anticipated the violence at the heart of present-day Israel and Palestine.
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