Yael Bartana, "Assassination", 2011, photo from the movie set, photo by Joanna Kinowska
Israeli artist Yael Bartana, whose project "...and Europe Will Be Stunned" comprises the exhibition of the Polish Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice, also presents her latest film in Warsaw
"Assassination" / "Zamach" is the last part of the Bartana's "Polish" trilogy, which includes her earlier movies: "Nightmares" / "Mary Koszmary" (2007) and "Wall and Tower" / "Mur i Wieża" (2009). Yael Bartana's project is sort of a experimental, national psychotherapy, in which she invokes historical demons and drags them out into daylight. Aside from the complex image of Polish-Jewish relations, it is also a universal story about being prepared to except an outsider and the problem of cultural integration in the unstable world full of political tensions and revolutions. The film takes place in a symbolic space full of scars after ethnic conflicts and wars. It combines issues relating to the Israeli settlement movement, Zionist dreams, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Palesinian right of return.
The series, presented in its whole form for the first time at Polish Pavillon in Venice, is dedicated to the Jewish Rennaissance Movement in Poland (apointed by the artist) - a political group that calls for the "return" of over three million Jews to their ancestral homeland.
In the latest installment of the series, Bartana broaches the dream of building a multiethnic community, a new Polish society. The "Assassination" takes place in the near future, during the funeral ceremony of a leader of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, who is killed by an unidentified assassin. His symbolic death arises a myth of a new movement, whose activities could degenerate into a concrete political proposal, possible to implement in Poland, Europe or the Middle East.
The film was made in spring 2011 in Warsaw: near Krakowskie Przedmiescie street, in the interiors of the Palace of Culture and Science and on Piłsudskiego square. The manifesting members of the Movement mingled on the streets of Warsaw, among others with members of the Animal Rights Organization and groups of people praying in front of the Presidential Palace for the victims of the disaster in Smoleńsk, receiving both feedback of sympathy and hate. The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland will have is first official congress in 2012, during the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
"Nightmare" / "Mary Koszmary" is the first film in the trilogy and explores a complicated set of social and political relationships among Jews, Poles and other Europeans in the age of globalisation. A young activist, played here by Sławomir Sierakowski (founder and chief editor of 'Krytyka Polityczna' magazine), delivers a speech in the abandoned National Stadium in Warsaw. He urges three million Jews to come back to Poland. Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, "Mary Koszmary" addresses contemporary anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals and the Zionist dream of return to Israel. As Yael Bartana says: 'This is a very universal story; as in previous works, I have treated Israel as a sort of a social laboratory, always looking at it from the outside. These are mechanisms and situations which can be observed anywhere in the world. My recent works are not just stories about two nations - Poles and Jews. This is a universal presentation of the impossibility of living together.'
The second film "Wall and Tower" / "Mur i Wieża" was made in the Warsaw district of Muranów, where a new kibbutz was erected at actual scale and in the architectural style of the 1930's. This kibbutz, constructed in the centre of Warsaw, was an utterly 'exotic' structure, despite its perverse reflection of the history of the location, which had been the Jewish residential area before the war, and then a part of Warsaw Ghetto. The film invokes previous heroic images of strong and beautiful men and women who mythically established Israel. They were depicted as determined pioneers who, despite the most unfavorable conditions, kept building houses, cultivating land, studying, bringing up children collectively, sharing their assets and constantly training to fight off potential enemy attacks. This is the world that the artist proposes to resurrect in the 21st century, in an entirely different political and geographical configuration. Bartana says: 'I quote the past, the time of Socialist utopia, youthfulness and optimism - when there was a project of constructing a modernist idea of a new world.'
Parallel to premiering at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice "Assassination (Zamach)" will be shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
Curators: Sebastian Cichocki, Galit Eilat.
Yael Bartana, "Assassination" ("Zamach"), 2011, RED transfered to HD. The film was commissioned by Artangel, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, in association with Annet Gelink Gallery, Sommer Contemporary Art, Ikon Gallery, Netherlands Film Fund, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Artis, produced by My-i Productions in association with Artangel.
Warsaw premiere: June 3, 7 PM.
Screen projections of the film take place at the gallery till August 21, 2011.
Zachęta National Gallery of Art
Plac Małachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warsaw
Acting as Director: Hanna Wróblewska
tel. (+48 22) 827 58 54, 556 96 00
fax (+48 22) 827 78 86
www.zacheta.art.pl
Source: press release