by Yael Bartana
And Europe Will Be Stunned is a trilogy by artist Yael Bartana, presented at the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. The trilogy is an example of film practice that expands beyond and comes back to the screen, balancing fact, artistic intervention, and fiction, as the three films center around The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), initiated by the artist together with other colleagues, and calling for the 3,300,000 Jews to return to Poland. Today, Bartana’s trilogy seems prescient in the way it tackles the hauntedness of both history and the future.
According to Polish curator and art critic Joanna Mytkowska, “We do not really know whether the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland is a genuine party (…) or whether it is a political hallucination. It is in films, after all, that fiction constantly mixes with reality, the living with ghosts, and facts with fables. This is a process akin to the activity of the collective unconscious, where imaginings and fantasies can be forged into actions.” (The Return of the Stranger, 2012)
Yael Bartana (born in Israel in 1970) employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities, and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances, and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects such as national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals, and collective gatherings. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is represented in the collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam.
