The artist's early works were documentary films concerned with political and social issues in Israel and Palestine, as well as Israeli symbols, especially the rituals of socialization, on which the nation and national identity are based. Her three-minute film Profile (2000), created during her studies, presents female soldiers in a shooting range, cleaning weapons. The artist refers here to the times of her own military service.
The process of the militarization of Israel was also the subject of her film Trembling Time (2001). It presented cars stopping during a minute of silence for Yom HaZikaron. In the film, the artist extended this moment to almost seven minutes, thus emphasizing an emotional manipulation – if Israeli soldiers are still dying, why should the time of mourning be limited to sixty seconds?
Kings of the Hill (2003), made two years later, presents off-road cars practising driving up and down the sandy dunes and beaches north of Tel Aviv. Bartana compared this game of off-road vehicles to the myths lying at the foundation of the Israeli society – a specific type of machismo and militarization of norms and values, even though this time the ritual she was documenting was not backed by the state authorities, as in the cases of Profile and Trembling Time. The artist described this film as a metaphor for a self-destructive society.
The film Odds and Ends (2005) was similar in its character – Bartana focused on the ritual of shopping. The power of this four-minute video largely results from the artist's decision to shoot it from a bird's eye view. The movements of people she recorded to some extent resemble riots. This time, however, they are not related to the categories of class, gender, religion or culture – the participants' goal is to obtain products put on sale. Typical megastore Muzak blends with the noise of trading.
In 2004, Bartana realized the four-channel installation Low Relief (II). She shot her footage at two different demonstrations, and applied a digital effect transforming film image into a monochrome low-relief, with the intention of questioning the effectiveness of these actions. The demonstrators, Jews and Palestinians, were demanding the end of war.
Her two-channel video installation Wild Seeds (2005) shows eighteen-year-olds playing a game they made up. The idea is to imitate the evacuation of one of Palestinian settlements. Two teenagers are chosen to represent “the authorities” who are to break up the rest of the participants, grouped in a circle in a “protest” against the evacuation. The second projection features a translation of the conversations and cries of the players – as a result, the viewer's attention is split between text and image. Without the image, the text becomes hostile and could pass as a record of an authentic evacuation. Fiction and reality merge. The six-minute film was recorded in the Occupied Territories, however, the participants in this game are the young descendants of Zionists opposing the occupation of Palestine.
In A Declaration (2006) Bartana turned to the national symbols of Israel. The film begins with a view of a waving Israeli flag, stuck on a small rock in the sea, and a city – Jaffa – in the background. A young man rows towards the rock, carrying an olive tree sapling – symbolic of peace and hope (a bird sent from Noah's ark brings him back an olive branch, signifying the end of the Biblical flood) – in his boat. When he reaches the little isle, he substitutes the flag for the tree, and eventually enters a contemplative state. In this film, Bartana, played with the Zionist propaganda of the 1930s and 40s, which later later became an important point of reference in her works.
Summer Camp (2007), shown at Documenta XI in Kassel, also referenced old propaganda films exhorting Jews to settle in Palestine. Bartana's film documented the process of reconstruction of a Palestinian house during the fourth summer camp organized by the ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) – an organization introducing direct action, though non-violent, as as a protest tool. Alongside her own film, Bartana projected the Zionist propaganda film on which she based her own piece. The artist shows how the Zionist rhetoric of construction was used by the ICAHD as a form of protest against Israeli domination.
The Polish Trilogy
In 2006, Bartana made her first trip to Poland. One year later, she created the film Nightmares (2007), in collaboration with the Foksal Gallery Foundation. It was the first time she conceived a film plot, in dialogues with the local, Polish context. The film featured Sławomir Sierakowski, the editor-in-chief of Krytyka Polityczna. He played a young communist agitator, in a leather coat, red tie, and horn-rimmed spectacles. The leader delivers a passionate speech in the empty, destroyed 10th Anniversary Stadium (before the construction of the National Stadium commenced). His appeal is addressed to Jews who used to live in Poland – his intention is to convince them to return. Most of the three million Jews that he has in mind, however, died during the Second World War as victims of the Nazi death machine. Sierakowski says:
We are tired of only seeing faces similar to our own. Now we know that we cannot live alone. We need the Other, and we have no Other closer than yourselves. Come! We shall live together, be different but not hurt one another.
At the end of the film, the activist is joined by a group of children in scout uniforms. Dorota Jarecka, a critic for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, noted that the film got “right to the core of the argument over Polish antisemitism, reawakened by Jan T. Gross's book [Fear]. The Israeli artist's Yael Bartana's point is not that the Poles should blame themselves once again, but that they learn how to talk about Polish-Jewish issues.”