Still-frame from ... And Europe will be Stunned
The Israeli artist presents her compelling three-part fictional documentary on the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Hornsey Town Hall in London
... And Europe will be Stunned is currently on show at the Berlin Biennale as one of the main projects of this year's event. Bartana's film project has also been traveling the globe and a number of galleries and museums across the globe, including the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada between and at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark.
The series was between 2007-2011 and premiered at the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Revolving around the activities of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, a group that calls for the return of three million Jews to Poland, Bartana’s films traverse a landscape scarred by the histories of competing nationalisms and nightmares across Europe and the Middle East. The first film Mary Koszmary focuses on a young activist played by Sławomir Sierakowski (founder and chief editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine) who 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 2 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. The second film Wall and Tower was made in the Warsaw district of Muranów, where a new kibbutz was erected at actual scale and in the architectural style of the 1930s. The third film Assassination sees the destruction of the dream and the assassination of its leader.
Laura Cumming writes in the 13th May edition of the Observer that
Every scene has its historic counterpart by association or inversion: that is the obvious interpretation. But the experience of watching these films as works of art is altogether different. Each feels like a trauma played out in the form of a nightmare, plausible, sequential, even logical until the sleeper awakes, baffled and horrified by what he or she saw. How is it possible for Polish antisemitism to have persisted after the Holocaust that took place on its soil? How is it possible for Israel to have occupied Palestinian territory? Here is the sleep of reason.
Bartana's films swim between fact and fiction. They move seamlessly from one genre to another, from documentary to biopic to Riefenstahl. The performances are remarkable, especially that of the leader Slawomir Sierakowski – both patently a performance (he is occasionally seen dropping his eyes to a script) and yet somehow authentic.
Yael Bartana was born in 1970 in Moshav Kfar-Yehezkel in northern Israel. She studied at BFA, The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, in 1992-96, attended MFA studies at the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1999 as well as the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, 2000-2001. The artist lives and works in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam. In recent years Bartana has aroused great international attention and in 2010 was awarded the Artes Mundi Prize, one of the UK’s major art prizes.
On Friday the 18th of May the Whitechapel Art Gallery hosts a screening, symposium and panel discussion with the artist, curators and art experts Joanna Mytkowska, Gil Hochberg and Jacqueline Rose. Art Angel, which commissioned the third part of the trilogy, is hosting a special show of ... And Europe Will Be Stunned at Hornsey Town Hall in London’s Crouch End between the 22nd of May - 1st of July.
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London, E1 7QX, Great Britain
Tel. 020 7522 7896
www.whitechapelgallery.org
Hornsey Town Hall
The Broadway, London N8 9JJ
www.hornsey-town-hall.org.uk
For more information, see: www.artangel.org.uk
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Art Angel