Curator: Gaëlle Morel
From September 11 to October 24, 2009. Opening Saturday September 11 at 7:30 pm.
An exhibition produced by VOX and presented as part of the 11th event of the Mois de la Photo à Montréal.
EXHIBITION VIEWS | BIOGRAPHY
BY Gaëlle Morel
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal present an exhibition gathering the works of the artist Yael Bartana around the theme "The Spaces of the Image".
In her video installation Summer Camp + Awodah (2007), Israeli/Dutch artist Yael Bartana also uses the principle of double projection to break away from documentary conventions. The work refers to symbols and myths drawn from the history of Israel, appropriating the language, music, and images of 1930s-style propaganda. The work consists of two screens placed back to back inside a wooden projection booth. On one side, Bartana shows the rebuilding of a Palestinian house demolished by the Israeli army in the village of Anata, east of Jerusalem, during the summer of 2006. The house is being rebuilt by local villagers with the help of a group of European and Israeli volunteers who are members of a nongovernmental organization known as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, which undertakes singular acts of non-violent resistance by choosing to build rather than destroy.1 Traditionally, construction has symbolized the renaissance of the Jewish people and its resurrection in the land of Israel.
Running at the same time as this video is an excerpt from Helmar Lerski’s film Awodah (1935), which was made to promote the immigration of Jewish pioneers from Eastern Europe to Palestine. The music for the film, composed by Paul Dessau and scored for an ensemble of ten musicians playing Western and Arabic instruments, accompanies both projections. Although the soundtrack matches the lyricism of the epoch that produced it, it generates a deep rift between the images and the melody. The musical synchrony accentuates the visual divergence. In order to resist expansionist ideology, Bartana has adopted the formalist propaganda codes used in films commissioned by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund. Handed down from socialist realism, these include low-angle shots, close-ups, the glorification of the body, a concentration on productive endeavours and a lack of dialogue. Thus Bartana employs the “heroic ideological language of the Zionist enterprise to demonstrate its disintegration.” 2
1. Sergio Edelsztein, « Utopias and Historical Reversibility », dans Yael Bartana, Short Memory, Tel Aviv, The Center for Contemporary Art, 2008, p. 26.
2. Galit Eilat, « Non Zionist Propaganda », in Yael Bartana, Short Memory, ibid., p. 108.
Web site of the Mois de la Photo à Montréal
Biographical Notice Yael Bartana was born in 1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel. She lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Bartana’s video work is rooted in specific times and places: the Gilad Heights, site of a forced evacuation in 2002 and subsequently a stomping ground for a group of teenagers (Wild Seeds, 2005); the minute of silence of Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers), which, for a brief moment, brings traffic to a halt (Trembling Time, 2001); a reconstruction site (Summer Camp, 2007); a truck race among sand dunes (Kings of the Hill, 2003). These slices of ordinary life nonetheless bear the weight of political significance. Bartana’s early works, made in the 1990s, recorded communal rituals in which the faint outlines of Israel’s latent ideological issues can be seen taking shape. In the new millennium, her work began to focus on the nation’s founding and the complex construction of its identity, as envisioned in the archetypes of Zionist propaganda. Bartana has reappropriated this historical legacy of films, speeches, and posters, combining them with her own images (Summer Camp, 2007) or re-creating their aesthetics through mimicry (Mary Koszmary, 2007). The strategies of montage and superimposition in her films and photographs force the scenes that she has filmed live to coexist with propaganda images, which are slowly dismantled and deprived of their original political vigour. By giving us works that eschew every form of fixed interpretation, Bartana continually replays the possible narratives of Israel and its social dynamics.
Yael Bartana has participated in various exhibitions in Israel (We Never Looked Better, Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, 2008; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2004) as well as in Documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007). She has also had several solo shows at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York, 2003, 2008).
credit : Michel Brunelle⇧