Screening Room: Yael Bartana
In this tenth Screening Room we are pleased to present the work of Yael Bartana (1970, Kfar Yehezkel, Israel). Her third solo exhibition at the gallery – Patriarchy is History – is currently on view in our exhibition spaces in Milan. This new show is the natural consequence of the artist’s ongoing interdisciplinary project What if Women Ruled the World? (2017–present). With video, sculptures, and photographs Bartana questions our recent history and current times.
In her research films, installations, sculptures, and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like “homeland”, “return” and “belonging”. Bartana investigates these through ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state.
Bartana was commissioned to make the main artwork for the 2014 IHME Contemporary Art Festival in Helsinki. True Finn, this is its English title, is a feature film (50’) the artist shot inviting, with an open call, eight Finnish-resident individuals. Each person had a different ethnic, religious and political background. In 2015 Bartana said about the film, “I see True Finn more as a laboratory of what’s happening in Europe in general right now. The recent era of migration has created a fundamentalist and reactionary voice against the organization of the West. I wanted to look into this whole story of the nation-state from the 19th century, which is currently readjusting itself”.
Those eight people lived together for seven days in a house in the countryside. This work is an extraordinary gem that enables us to reflect on identity and questions such as: What happens when these people live together for a week and re-define “Finnishness”, and themselves in relation to others?
How does national identity operate as a means of inclusion and exclusion?
Can an immigrant become a true Finn?
With True Finn, I wanted to expand and update the idea of what it means to be a Finn by creating a platform for the people involved with the project to express their own identity.
– Yael Bartana
As happens frequently in Bartana’s practice works (photographs, sculptures, installations) can stem from the videos. This is also the case of the neon Black Stars Shed No Light. This sentence is the opening line of a new Finnish anthem wrote by those eight people in True Finn. Each of these eight participants contributed to a sentence for the new anthem.
Bartana offers this work as a both counterpoint and reversal of right-wing Finnish nationalism; a theme at the heart of True Finn.