5-29 June 2025
Finissage June 29 Free entry 18h-22h
as a part of FRAMED FEST
Wasserturm Prenzlauer Berg – Diedenhofer Str. 20
YAEL BARTANA: HOMESICK
Curator: Noam Gal
Along the thirty years of making her internationally acclaimed film productions, artist Yael Bartana has consistently engaged with another material in her exhibitions, a material that still awaits more public and critical attention.
Neon statements that served as titles for Bartana’s projects, publicly written by the characters in her films, now take precedence at an unusual historical site. Against the dark background of the 150-year-old Wasserturm – once a municipal water reservoir, then a Nazi detention camp, then a deserted closed vault under a serene public park – these neon signs mix thought with electricity, two sources of energy we historically associate with enlightenment and progress. Inside this intense, cool well we are drawn to contemplate Bartana’s illuminating slogans not simply as individual artistic expressions, but rather as the advertisements for collective calls for action, especially today, with the fast erosion of humanism’s core ideals: the concept of History requires fixing, the term Utopia demands activation, we have ignored the gender significance of Crisis, we have not taken our own ‘Dreams‘ seriously enough. These doubts stream through the electrified tubes of a noble gas which has often served the verbal and geometric expressions of conceptualism and minimalism. Following those visual traditions, simple ideas transcend the material edges of the conventional art object, as their light spreads out to their indeterminate surroundings. These neons mimic commercial design, as if they could promote sales at any point around our commodified planet (as political agendas, indeed, seem to turn trends on and off). Yet, here, these fluorescent mottos have finally found a quieter spot, retaining their status as sheer ideas for us to take back home, even when it is so insecure.
OPENING TIMES:
June 10
Closed
June 11
12:00 PM – 10:00 PM
June 12 – 14
4:00 PM – 7:00 PM (each day)
June 15
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
June 16 – 29
12:00 PM – 10:00 PM (daily)
Erez, 2023
The most modest in size among the works of the exhibition, Eretz entwines the Hebrew word for ‘country’ or ‘land’ with the simple form of the oat, the single plant in the grain field. It is, so far, the only neon work Bartana has produced in her mother tongue, Hebrew (as part of her ‘Light to the Nations’ exhibition at the Center for Digital Art in Holon), but even native Hebrew speakers may find the sign difficult to decipher – a reflection of the difficulty to organically and unquestionably identify with one’s homeland that has characterized Bartana’s art and action for many years. While trying to see in this light-sculpture both the three letter word [ארץ] – in itself a charged term which denotes either any country or traditionally the Holy Land – and the oat or wheat plant, another meaning is suddenly turned on: the Hebrew word for ‘oat’ is Shibboleth, a term that refers to the deadly speech-test used to identify one’s true nationality, a code to distinguish and separate one people from another, in spite of their common characters.
And Europe Will Be Stunned, 2010
The first neon sign Bartana has ever created, And Europe Will Be Stunned welcomed the visitors to her eponymous solo exhibition at Moderna Museet, Malmö, where the artist presented the films “Nightmares” and “Wall and Tower”, to which “Assassination” joined the following year as the trailblazing trilogy representing Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennial. That rich cinematic production narrated the fictional call for the return of 3.3 million Jews to their ancestral homeland, its active realization in the form of founding new Jewish settlements in the heart of Warsaw, and its eventual catastrophic outcome as the leader of that Jewish revival movement is assassinated, thus turned into a national symbol of loss. Not everyone remembers the controversies which Bartana’s critical play with alternate histories of national displacement aroused fifteen years ago, yet something in the commercial style of that bright-red electric hand-writing still lures us in, as if at some motel or nightclub, asking: Is Europe indeed stunned today, and by what? Look at this sign: where does the diagonal statement lead us – are the words falling back to the past tense, or do they still climb upwards to the future?
Homesick, 2025
Made especially for this show, the artist created Homesick, a term which letters are broken by the incomplete electric illumination, and words are separated into two lines, as in a poem. This means that the usual definition of ‘homesick’ – that of longing for one’s origins of belonging, that strong, yet painful desire to go back, to cancel that distance from one’s home – that definition gives way to a different meaning: that home is sick, home itself is in pain. Bartana, throughout her long artistic path, is known for observing her motherland – Israel – with a critical eye, turning her creative cameras and film productions against the strengthening ties of religious and military powers within Israeli political culture. That critical gaze is taken from afar, as the artist has been living and working in Europe for nearly thirty years. Now, as some of the horrific images from her filmic prophecies (like in Inferno from 2013, or Two Minutes to Midnight from 2021) seem ever more congruent with the reality of the region, Bartana thinks of Israel once again. Could it possibly be that she’s homesick because her homeland is so ill and broken? Originally, ‘nostalgia’ means the pain (algos) of homecoming (nostos), yet what emotion is clearer than wanting to be home when you’re sick?
Patriarchy is History, 2019
Historically, neon signs have developed as installations decorating commercial facilities that market their commodities and services in the public sphere. When taken up by conceptual artists, from the sixties to the present, this simple technological platform has confusingly replaced brands with statements, selling metaphors instead of products. But, you see, even this bit of cultural history may already be biased, according to Bartana’s poignant Patriarchy Is History (taken from her long term project What If Women Ruled the World); a more critical view would be rather suspicious of any attempt to separate so clearly artworks from advertisements. This Bartana does advertises, wishing us to memorize: our collective pasts are universally shaped by male-dominated narratives and meanings. At the same time, she foresees – this time is up, male domination belongs to the past.
Next Year in New Jerusalem, 2020
Concluding many Jewish prayers, such as in the close of Yom Kippur, or as the last note of the Passover dinner ritual, Jews greet one another with the words “next year in Jerusalem” – a symbolic gesture commonly used from Medieval times to the present and recalls both the faith in Jerusalem as a collective source of theological orientation, and their own location far from it, in diaspora. Bartana turned that prayer line into a neon circle, thus revealing its inner contradiction: a clear direction for national desire is marked ritually, as repetition that is never fulfilled. Yet, following the verbal trickery typical of conceptual art throughout the past century, Bartana dares to interrupt the traditional greeting with a single new word – indeed, the word “New”. New Jerusalem, if taken as an alternative destination for collective hope may not be the same place as the thousands year old city we know from our usual maps of the war-ridden Middle East. Where could it be, then?
Wenn Ihr wollt ist es kein Traum, 2013
The 1902 utopian novel Altneuland by Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish return to the Land of Israel, and considered by many as the founding text of political Zionism. The novel’s epigraph “Wenn Ihr wollt ist es kein Märchen” (If You Will It This Is Not A Legend) became synonymous with both Herzl’s prophetic heritage and the eventual territorial realization of the State of Israel, while few remember the epilogue that completed that statement at the very end of the novel – “and if you do not will it, a dream it is and a dream it will stay” – which from a literary perspective underscores the fictive and poetic registers in Herzl’s narrative. Bartana followed that path of alternate fiction, replacing Herz’l “Legend” with “Dream” (in the context of staging a meeting of Herzl and Freud in her eponymous exhibition at the Secession, Vienna in 2012), illuminating the conventional Zionist agenda with more hallucinatory or misleading connotations, while still recalling the potential of collective will in the very act of waking up and looking at reality rather than at fairytales.
Crisis-Crysis-Crycis, 2020
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” These are the words of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, written while he was imprisoned by the Fascists, a full century ago. Gramsci responded to the total political and social collapse under which any expression of the individual – such as the “Cry” a woman shares with her “Sister” – is outlawed, and fear becomes the ultimate tool of control. Yet, it is that same alarming word – Crisis – from which critique and criticism stem, that basic motivation for the creative thought and praxis of Gramsci, Bartana, and an endless number of other artists far beyond modern times. The artistic act may be that kernel of resistance struggling to grow at the heart of any critical moment: take another look at the shape created in the middle of this sign, bottom up, Y-Y-I; now say it – why, why? I (this is the answer!); now take another look – isn’t it just another single growing plant like the oat of Eretz?
Black Stars Shed No Light, 2014
This strange line comes from Bartana’s 2014 film True Finn, in which a group of young Finns from various ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds meet up in a remote, snowed in farm, to discuss the essence of belonging to Finland. They contemplate authenticity and migration, they try to invent a new flag and an alternative, multicultural anthem, but apart from the exhausting collective effort, these troubling issues seem to occupy each of them individually. On his turn, Peter offers the enigmatic line “Black stars shed no light. Oppressing, take our breath away,” which is chosen to be included in the shared new anthem, sung together by all members of in that strange camp, in spite of the oppositional ideas and the undercurrent contradictions between hospitality and animosity, between light and darkness, out in the faraway frozen plains seen in the film, and here, inside the hollow letters of this somber neon.
Trembling Times, 2017
Typical of Bartana’s conceptual sensibilities across her artistic practices, language is exposed as a mechanism for ambiguities and contradictions. When letters look unstable, when neon words are fixed on a reflective plexiglass sheet, the meaning of the most common expressions confuses us by their own visual multiplication. One way to experience this confusion and let other meanings sink in, is trying to read the sign aloud over and over: “trembling times trembling” turns then into the most basic algebraic operation, which sheds some irony on the ordinary habit of relating to our period in history as exceptionally unsteady and perilous. That implied multiplication was already present in the short video Trembling Time which the artist created in 2001.
Utopia Now!, 2024
Taken up from the Greek by the sixteenth century humanist philosopher Thomas More, the invented term ‘Utopia’ literally means ‘no place’. Now, this promise for an imagined haven seems to be falling right on your head when you stand at the very center of the Wasserturm dark and cold vault. If you could catch it, what would you do with this idea? “In a place where redemptive fantasies were played out and ended in catastrophe”, Bartana has recently said, “one should know that the idea of utopia can be very dangerous when it is in the wrong hands.”
Credits:
Works conceived and produced by Yael Bartana and her studio: Richard Gabriel Gersch, Saskia Wendland, and Adi Nachman. Neon graphic design: Guy Sagee, except for Black Stars & Next Year in Jerusalem, designed by Oded Korach.
The works in the exhibition appear in courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Petzel Gallery, New York; Capitain Petzel, Berlin and Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm.
Special loans to the exhibition made possible by Mr. Jan Fischer, Renee and Bob Drake Collection, Private Collection from Belgium and by a private collection from Paris.
