The following is a transcript of Yael Bartana and Juli Carson in Conversation: Filmic Pre-enactment in the Geopolitical Field. It was recorded on April 4, 2022 in tandem with the exhibition Malka Germania, curated by Juli Carson for UCI’s Contemporary Art Gallery, January 22 – April 9, 2022.
Introduction
In this chapter of Life Worth Living, entitled Malka Germania, we publish a transcript of Yael Bartana and Juli Carson in Conversation:Filmic Pre-enactment in the Geopolitical Field. The public talk took place on April 4, 2022 in coordination with the American Premiere of Malka Germania at UCI. The film–originally commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin for Bartana’s retrospective Redemption Now–features an androgynous female “Messiah” who, upon arriving to Berlin, returns all the city’s repressed traumata to the surface. “Malka Germania” is Hebrew for “Queen Germany,” which “Germania” alone simultaneously connotes the historic megalomaniacal Nazi vision of the city of Berlin. As with Bartana’s film trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, the dichotomies of past/present, trauma/utopia, villain/victim, amnesia/memory, and precocity/stability have a kind of möbius quality, as if in a dreamscape. Produced over the course of 2020 when the “apocalyptic” convergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US-presidential elections, and the Black Lives Matter protests all converged, Malka Germania’s “end days” scenario marks both its timely and uncanny value. Certainly, the idea of a savior rising to thwart the horror of totalitarian regimes has startling resonance, as global politics have given rise to a renewed battle between democracy and autocracy. However, before we congest up such a savior, it’s wise to heed the forewarning embedded in Bartana’s fever-dream vision: Be Careful what you wish for!
Liz Stringer
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Yael Bartana and Juli Carson in Conversation: Filmic Pre-enactment in the Geopolitical Field. This is an event hosted by the University Art Gallery, here at UC Irvine. This talk has been organized to complement the UAG’s current exhibition and the American premiere of Malka Germania, a three-channel video installation originally commissioned in 2020 by The Jewish Museum, Berlin as part of Bartana’s retrospective exhibition Redemption Now. My name is Liz Stringer, and I’m a first year MFA student at UCI. I’m honored to introduce Yael Bartana and Juli Carson today, and I’ll also be your MC for this conversation. We’re recording this conversation, so if you’d like to remain unrecorded, just please turn your video off. And the UAG would like this Zoom event to be something like an in-person conversation. So if you have any questions that arise, while Yael or Juli are speaking, please feel free to drop your questions in the chat or raise your hand function to ask your question directly, and I’ll interject putting you in there. But there will also be a Q&A session at the end for any lingering questions.
So, to begin, Yael Bartana has exhibited worldwide, and is represented in the collections of many different museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the Tate Modern, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. Some solo exhibitions include the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and many others. She won the Artes Mundi 4 Prize in 2010. Her film trilogy, And Europe Will Be Stunned, which made its American premiere here as well, was ranked as the ninth most important artwork of the 21st century by the Guardian in 2019. Juli Carson is a Professor of Art at the University of California Irvine, where she directs the Critical and Curatorial Area in the Department of Art, where she also directs the University Art Galleries. From 2018 through 2019 she was the Philippe Jabre Professor of Art History and Curating in the Department of Fine Art and Art History at the American University of Beirut. Her books on the convergence of psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and conceptual art include, but are not limited to, The Hermeneutic Impulse: Aesthetics of an Untethered Past and The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics. So now I’m going to hand this off to Juli, please go for it.
Juli Carson
Thanks Liz!
I’m thrilled to have Yael here, even just virtually, because I always love talking to and being around Yael. I’ll begin with an anecdote, about how Yael and I met, because it’s a good way to see how Yael’s medium is really talking with people. I was directed to Yael through some friends we shared—Constanze Ruhm and Andrea Geyer—if you remember them, Yael, way back when. It was my first trip to Israel, and I was specifically going to Jerusalem to visit the Steven Spielberg Archives, which included documentation of Adolf Eichmann’s infamous trial in Jerusalem. Of course, duplicates of those documents are in New York as well, but I said no, you must go to Jerusalem to see them. And all this was because we were showing Andrea Geyer’s film installation Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, about Eichmann. So, when I got done with my research early and I asked my friends what I else should I do? They said: Go do a studio visit with Yael in Tel Aviv! I was happy to go to the studio because I already knew Yael’s work, particularly the first two works of her film trilogy related to the fictional group The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). But she hadn’t completed filming the third film yet. So we started talking about this, and then, Yael, you mentioned you were going to do this performance, where the JRMiP folks were either going to the moon or coming back from the moon, I can’t remember. And I said: Oh yeah, that’s from Hannah Arendt’s passage, in Zionism Reconsidered, where she responds to the Zionist slogan that Israel was “a land without people for a people without land,” a horribly misguided slogan that began forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948, otherwise known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe. Quoting Arendt, the Zionists “escaped to Palestine as one might wish to escape to the moon, to a region beyond the wickedness of the world. True to their ideals, they established themselves on the moon; and with the extraordinary strength of their faith they were able to create small islands of perfection.”[1] And then, Yael, you go “that’s great!” So I left Israel to go work on Andrea’s show and thought, well, that’s that! But then, I don’t know how many months later, I hear from Yael who sent me the performance we’d were talking about with relation to Arendt, Zionism and the moon. You said: Here’s the video, have fun, enjoy this piece. And then I thought to myself: Ok, now I must work with Yael. That was 2009, and we’ve been talking to each other ever since! I thought I should begin with this memory because this this conversation is taking place in an art department, and, among others, we are addressing our thoughts about art production to aspirational graduate students and you’re an amazing interdisciplinary artist with a unique manner of working collaboratively with so many people, always in conversation with dozens or hundreds of people at a given time, across every discipline. When Yael completed the third piece of the JRMiP trilogy, I jumped at the chance to premiere it as the first installation inaugurating our Contemporary Arts Center Gallery. A while goes by and then Yael calls saying: I have good news and bad news. The great news is I’m going show the completed trilogy at the Venice Biennale, in the Polish Pavilion, and the not-so-great news is you won’t have it first. And I said, no, no, that’s great!! We’ll do the American premiere. You know, what a magnificent thing. And the rest is history, as well. So that was the first premiere of Yael’s work here, we have the second with Malka Germania, which I’m so thrilled Yael allowed us to do. So Yael, tell us what Malka Germania is about, why did you make it, and, oh, why is your hair blonde? [Laughs]
Yael Bartana
You asked me why my hair is blonde?
Juli Carson
Yeah.
Yael Bartana
So, thank you first of all, for this wonderful meeting. On Zoom, we’re all avatars so it’s great. And yes, Juli and I have been talking for ages and what Juli does is she explains to me what I know, but she’s a few steps ahead of me. I only have to say one thing, and she just completes the rest. Anyway, so yeah, Malka Germania is, I would say, is quite a personal project. It probably sounds very weird, maybe to all of you seeing this kind of very epic film, but in a way it’s a very personal project because I’ve been spending 10 years here in Germany and I have had ongoing dialogue with Germany, contemporary Germany, historical Germany, and the future Germany. When the Jewish Museum—specifically Shelley Harten—had this idea that they would like to have a retrospective of my works in the in the context of the Jewish Museum, the one condition I gave was if I could make a new work. I agreed to do it, because I had suffered for so many years embattled with Berlin, Germany and the Germans and Jews with all these kinds of intensive, conscious, and unconscious conversations. So I thought this is a good moment to really make a new piece. It all started with a dream. I know that Juli mentions the metaphor of a fever dream in her essay, but the work actuallystarted with a dream I’d had. In the dream, I saw the replacing of German street signs with Hebrew ones, and also all the stores and everything else in my neighborhood. It was all so suddenly familiar, and I wasn’t sure if it was a nightmare or a good fantasy. Is it homesickness? Or what is it? I started by thinking I would like to make a piece really just about that. I would simply replace the signs, and, even further, keep the signs in place, as is, and see what happens, how people would react. But then, one thing led to another, and suddenly the work switches overnight completely. Jetlagged, coming back to Berlin from a trip to New York, I sat for one night, just writing down 10 different episodes, thinking about the field I would like to make for the Jewish Museum, and it was like really a stream of consciousness. I just sat down, and thought about all the stuff that I’d accumulated over the years, and at the core of it was the question of redemption. The idea that the possibility or impossibility of redeeming the Jewish German from, you know, the past, and what then would be the image of redemption? So, the question for me—I think from today—will be the question: What is the image of redemption? We sort of know that the image of the Messiah is the image of a man on a donkey coming to redeem the Jewish people, you know, but of course in Christianity, Jesus is actually on the donkey. So this is sort of the ready-made image of the Messiah. And it’s always interesting to think why, actually, the donkey? You know, what is the meaning of the donkey? So, as for the meaning of the title “Malka Germania,” I will explain: “Malka” is “queen” in Hebrew and “Germania” is how we pronounce “Germany” in Hebrew. But also “Germania” was Hitler’s vision designed by the architect Albert Speer: how after Germany won the war there would be this Germania, the city of Berlin transformed from/as Romania (and it looks like the Roman Empire basically). So, in my proposal for the Jewish Museum, I asked: what is the redemption of Germania, which was really the title. Then, later on, it was important for me to mention the Fuhrer of the Redeemer is Malka, and, in Judaism, it should be a man, but of course I went against it. Instead, Malka is androgynous, and she has almost like the perfect look. Because for me, in my mind before I came to the to live in Germany, Germans are the perfect looking people, according to the propaganda. So, I kind of wanted to work with this so-called “Perfection.” So, yeah, these are a few notes on what/who Malka Germania is, and where the project started.
Juli Carson
It’s interesting that Malka Germania, which you had the Jewish Museum commission for your retrospective, was sort of the tail that wagged the dog, as it were, because it precipitated the content of the catalog, which, in turn, wasn’t the kind of traditional catalogue you find in conventional survey shows. It’s called The Book Germania and, in a Talmudic way, is structured around testimonies by scholars debating just who this Messiah is. I was particularly struck by how the curators described it in their introduction:
This book adopts the multi-layered methodology of the Jewish Talmud—a compilation of the central oral teachings of Rabbinic Judaism and source of Jewish learning. The printed Talmud is designed in a way that allows a whole conversation between different generations of Rabbis to take place on the same page—voicing different interpretations and thoughts on the central texts of Jewish law and heritage, the Midrash…The aim of this book is not to copy the Talmud in content or meaning. Nor do we wish to romanticize the Talmud. However, we do admire the polyphony and argumentative network established by different generations of interpretations and commentaries coming together on the same page. We hope to convey, through the book’s structure, nuance, and complexity as an antidote to the simple solutions often associated with the coming of a redeemer, be it political or religious.[2]
It’s also interesting how Redemption Now, as an exhibition, brings together all your previous work around this one piece, around the concept of redemption, which needs to be debated. In my essay on Malka Germania, I wrote: “In the formless world of infinite equivalence, redemption for one is redemption for all. Be careful what you wish for!” And thinking about what’s going on right now in Europe—how Putin’s war on Ukraine and its rippling effect on NATO countries—we can feel how intense and timely the paradox of redemption is. And as an Israeli, I know you’re particularly interested in redemption as a paradox: the fact that there is no redemption for some things. All the while, we need to wish for it. Do you want to talk about that?
Yael Bartana
Well one thing is to go back to Arendt’s passage on the moon, because the “land without people” was always full of people. But the “land without people” idea actually accords with the logic of science fiction because it’s always about going to conquer another land that is often empty along with the notion of pioneering and creating heroes. There’s an Israeli art historian, Doreet Levitte-Harten who always compares Zionism to science fiction because it has all those elements, and I really relate to this kind of way of thinking. So that’s where Malka Germania is…she’s removed a little bit from realism into a fantasy world, but that fantasy is actually the unconscious of what the West sees. So the figure of Malka is kind of like bursting a pimple for me. And that’s the redemption because I always consider my work as a kind of act of political imagination, a collective act of imagining something else, stemming from a wish to make change. And if you think of activists, when they want to make change—to create facts on the ground, create concrete changes in the landscape—they have to bring something repressed into awareness, political imagination is instrumental, as was the case with the Nakba, for example. But what was your question again Juli?
Juli Carson
Well, you’ve addressed the first part of it. But to further address this notion of redemption as a paradox, let me come at the question from a different angle. In Emmanuel Alloa’s essay “Pre-Enactment: About Mythical Time”—written for your jrp|ringier monograph—he conceives of myth as never being set in the present. As he puts it:
Whatever the community or the society under study, its myths are always set in a time that is a-contemporaneous. Nostalgic mythical time harks back to the distant past, while its utopian counterpart looks forward to the future: in either case, it never coincides with the present.[3]
If pre-enactment, on the other hand, “opens doors to other futures” it does so by positing the present as inextricably entangled with the two-prong nature of mythical time—historical nostalgia and utopian futurism—as a means of deconstructing those myths. That’s the act of political imagination I believe you were speaking of. And I think it’s an interesting way to read Malka Germania as well as all the like-minded work that preceded it. But particularly in Malka—where the question of redemption is most directly addressed—the mythical past-as-future fluidly come together, as in a dreamscape where all oppositions are opposed. Meaning you don’t get to have your idealized, cleaned up (mythical) identity. You know, your Nazi dogs are right there next to the Zionists, who are right next to the Leni Riefenstahl styled gymnasts, right next to the Messiah on a donkey, etc., all of which crescendos with the rising of Hitler/Speer’s Germania from the Wannsee Lake like the lost city of Atlantis. Wannsee Lake, of course, is the real-life location of the Wannsee Conference help by Nazi elite on January 20, 1942 to coordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” And so, redemption here, as a kind of pre-enactment, in fact looks towards a dystopian future, which I guess all end-day scenarios are. In this way, isn’t this more akin to science fantasy than science fiction? By the term science fantasy, I’m not only referring to the specific genre—a hybrid kind of speculative fictions that combines trope science fiction and fantasy—but to the dreamscape as Freud defined it. You know…that whatever’s in our unconscious gets returns from the repressed by route of the strange combinations of things we have consciously experienced, which is to say know. I think that’s what draws folks into the work, quite differently. It’s tapping into folks’ unconscious fantasies. At the opening of Malka Germania here, it was interesting that every single person who came out of the gallery remarked about some detail that piqued, bothered and/or moved them. Something different returns from the repressed in different viewers and sort of messes with their experience of mythical time. So that’s where I see the paradox of redemption operating, at the level of the return of the repressed. This is what you and I were playing with in recent conversations: that you’re a “documentarian of the unconscious,” in the most heterological way.
Yael Bartana
Yes. But the issue of why I think the possibility of redemption is a good thing is because it’s not just about feelings, it’s about facts. It’s always about other people, and you have to see who benefits from that redemption. I mean, we have a strong example right now. We know with Putin and Ukraine. It’s right now and it happens over and over again. One could think that of leaders, such as Hitler, as have strong political imagination. They have it because they also need redemption. They find a way to tell the story to create the means, to create a narrative, and also their heritage had a very strong, very advanced political imagination. These are the kind of examples that I look at and therefore why for me, it’s always dystopian. There is always that element already in all this, which the redemptive fantasy needs. There is always the dystopian element. For instance, in the Jewish Renaissance Movement, why do we need the aesthetics of the Stalinism if we are talking about a multi-culturalist beautiful world where we are all living together happily? I don’t know. I shot the JRMiP film trilogy between 2006 and 2011, but it refers of course, to the 30s to the 40’s, and those were the aesthetics of 100 years before, but that aesthetic was/is relevant for today. This is all just to say, through the aesthetics or the image production, how that history is still present today. And how can we use it as a way to think, alternatively, about the present and the future? But I also think of free enlightenment and refer to those too. It’s about the need to put together different times so that the past, present and future work together at the same time.
Juli Carson
Given what’s happening in Europe right now, I’ve the JRMiP project even more, while writing about the Malka project. By the way, since 2015 or so, off and on you’ve said the JRMiP was done. And for a while, it looked like it was. But then Trump got elected, and said to you “no, no, sadly, it’s not done.”
And now, Putin’s war on Ukraine has forced folks to try to get Russia removed from the United Nation’s Human Rights Council given the global consensus that what’s happening in Ukraine a genocide. So this is what we’re dealing with, we’ve sunk below the lowest days of Trump. So your ideas about political imagination are very compelling with regards to Putin’s claim—the big lie, actually—that Russian is going to Ukraine to de-nazify it. From there you get Putin’s propagandistic imagery of the good pioneer, noble cosmonaut, Christian, patriotic Russian East versus the queer, EU curious, neo-Nazi, drug-addled, satanic Ukrainian West.
The choice Putin presents is that between a dystopian Ukraine represented by an array of signifiers—the LGBQT rainbow flag, drug needles, Nazi salutes, etc. You know, the basic autocratic political imagination that Nazi-queer-drug addicts are taking over the Ukraine against Russia’s glorious Stalinist past representing the wholesome Christian Russian Patriarchy. This is the reason that redemption is always dystopic, like you said, or heterological in Bataille’s sense of the word. In which case, redemption is never a zero-sum game of “one versus the other,” the way Whack-a-Mole redemption is. As in, first you kill all my people with your political imaginary than I have revenge upon your people with my political imagination and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, in which one person’s genocide is another person’s liberationist revenge. But in this other model of redemption, we’re discussing, it’s definitely not a zero-sum game. It’s everything at once, impossibly together. That’s what we repress because it’s so uncomfortable that your work calls up.
On that note, can we pivot to talk about Malka Germania as an artwork? You’re very meaningful with every aesthetic step you make, not just in this project, but in all your projects. In particular, can you talk about the film installation’s scale? Because what Malka physically does to the viewer is different and more intense than your other projects. Also, can we talk about your methodology as a director? Particularly, your direction of the actor who plays Malka, not to mention the camel that you get to recognize the camera. All of that is magnificent, not to mention the sound the intensity of the sound as well.
Yael Bartana
First of all, I have to give disclosure that Malka Germania was never meant to be three channel installation. This is part of a process of making art, and thanks somehow to COVID I had plenty of time to edit. In the original idea, it was meant to be five different chapters on five different screens to go through different stories. But I had to reconsider a lot of things over the process. That’s the good thing about not having a script for Hollywood that I have to sign. The good thing about working independently is that I have a lot of freedom. So we shot all the scenes as we needed, and then during COVID we shot several scenes where we were replacing the street signs in very prime locations like Checkpoint Charlie, where I would never be able to get an empty street for free. Also, during the pandemic lockdown, we didn’t have the main actor, so my assistant wore the clothes and we just filmed them from behind. They were the same height, so we were able to collect a lot of material. Once we signed on the actor who played Malka, we shot everything in just four days. She’s actually an Australian actor and dancer who comes from performance art. I wanted to have her because I knew there would be some improvisation scenes, and I wanted someone who would find it easy to improvise mostly with the body language. For example, the scene where she’s with the Camel, I asked her to really dance with the camel, to sort of react to his pace and just be with him and kind of stay with him. And this was a very documentary moment that wasn’t really written, but I noticed that there was something very magical happening at that moment. I just wanted to stay with the moment and their kind of marriage together. It was very beautiful to see it.
And I felt, somehow, that the Camel was actually the Redeemer. He’s the one. I don’t know there was just something very strong about this character. In general, the camel represents nomadism in and from the Middle East. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a Middle Eastern camel. It’s actually very Siberian and doesn’t at all look like a camel that you’d find in the in the Middle East. But it doesn’t matter. It really somehow works.
With the actor who plays Malka, I taught her Hebrew, together with a writer friend who wrote a few lines for her to learn. we wanted her to practice Hebrew so the language was actually in her body and she would somehow connect because she’s such an outsider. She’s Australian, so she’s not related at all to the culture and history of Germany or Israel. I had to find a way that she feels, somehow, the language in her and to really feel the power of the redeemer in the kind of fantasy we were making. I also wanted her to think about that, so I told her that she was gonna look like a Nazi poster from the 1930s. So she had to relate, at once, to those discordant histories. She had to carry two different cultures in an embodied way. So the Hebrew was quite helpful for her to get into the role.
The other really interesting moment in production was working with the 100 German extras at the train station. But I did have a lot of guilty feelings because it’s a well-known image from collective memory, you know, a group of people standing at a train station. What we actually did later on, was to interview the extras. It wasn’t for the film, it was just for me, wanting to know what they experienced standing there like that. A lot of them said it made them think of the escape from the Communist Regime, from the East to the West. They felt like they were about to cross to liberty, to go back freedom. So, their interviews referred to that more so than the Holocaust, specifically. But it’s such a traumatic culture that they have enough trauma, referring to escaping and being refugees. Those layered traumas started to somehow be revealed through the simple act of standing at a train station. And, of course, instead of the train, the camel comes to pick them up, which is all very ironic and quite stupid…[laughing]
Juli Carson
…Yeah, about irony, I mean we’re talking about redemption, utopia, dystopia…all this displacement. But there’s a strong thread of humor and absurdity that’s always present in your work. You just mentioned it with camel coming instead of the train. Do you want to talk more about humor? And also—since I’m looking at the abracadabra print in your zoom background—the importance of charlatanism in the work as well. For instance, after you did the JRMiP Congress for the Berlin Biennale and subsequently made a film installation for the Vienna Secession, I remember that you wanted to stage a seance between Herzl and Freud as a means of asking: What If? Because the two had lived in Vienna at the same time but had never met each other. I thought, “Oh my god the, Viennese are not gonna appreciate this.” But anyway, you persisted as is your way [laughs] and set out interviewing real mediums to do a real seance. And you said you thought you had found a medium but found out that they were a charlatan! And I was like, “Isn’t that the point?” And you said, “No, actually, there are rules, like they can only communicate with somebody in their family.” I remember finding that ironic that in looking for a medium, you needed an authentic charlatan. I should say, in each project, there’s always some such level of absurdity which I love. Do you want to talk about this? This is the joy of working with you Yael!
Yael Bartana
It’s just, you know, Jewish humor. [Laughs] But seriously, with Germany, it’s very important to have humor otherwise you can’t take it because the topics are often so charged, so impossible. And it’s very helpful to have a moment of relief and it’s a way to distance myself from the topic and not take myself too seriously because what we are eventually talking about is art. So, it should be entertaining on some level, to some people. I don’t know if everybody gets my humor. But I think humor also allows people talking about ambiguity and ambivalence. I mean, people get very lost in this jokey kind of attitude, and they never understand it. For instance, in JRMiP, for 30 minutes were spent inviting 3 million Jews back to Poland. And people asked: Is it true? Is that really like how we’re there to send Jews back to the dust chambers? This ambiguous, ironic space makes people very confused. But for me it’s a very productive way to actually demand people work out their own fantasies, wishes, and imagination.
Juli Carson
Yael, you and I have been talking a lot about this because you’re working on a piece of writing about ambiguity in your work and ambiguity in general. In my opinion, an artist can represent ambiguity but can’t be ambiguous themselves, even if they are in real life. Because there’s always this moment in deciding to make something signify ambiguity you have to be very un-ambiguous in doing so. You have to decisively construct that through very specific means. At the VIP opening of Malka Germania, I spoke this during my introduction to work, your decisively non-dialectical way of working. Apropos of demonstrating this I took recourse to a classic text: Isiah Berlin’s 1953 book, The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it, Berlin quotes the 7th Century BC Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.” He evokes this parable as a framework to consider how Tolstoy—whom Berlin said was a fox who, all his life, wanted to be a hedgehog—derived his methodology for writing War and Peace. Basically, foxes are fascinated by the infinite variety of things, while hedgehogs relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. So, the fox courts paradox and contradiction as the world, and the hedgehog tries (always unsuccessfully) to reconcile the world’s contradictions towards one big idea. From this perspective, Dante, Pascal, Ibsen and Proust are all hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Balzac, Goethe and Joyce are foxes. I would say further say that the fox’s tactic is metonymic while the hedgehog’s is metaphoric. Yael, I think you employ both tactics in your work. And by evoking Isiah Berlin, we can think non-dialectically in terms of creating a given narrative. You know, actually slowing down and thinking about the paradoxes of the moment. In Malka I see this happening differently—as a dreamscape—than it does in JRMiP.
I’ll say just one more thing. When I went into Malka recently with somebody coming down to see the the work, it was right at the most intense moment after Ukraine and Russian head brass was bragging that Kiev would be taken in two days. And I’m thinking now of you mentioned, your guilt about putting these German extras on the train station because the trauma of East-West division during the Cold War, followed by the unification of Germany, and now Putin’s attempt to roll it all back. All of that Post-Cold War history seems to have evaporated and we’re on the other (prior) side of 1989. And watching the Germans at the train station just sucked the air right out of my lungs. So, Malka Germania is provincial. It has, dare I say, a Kantian sensibility in that it is both metaphysical and materialist. It’s a different film from week to week in a way that JRMiP wasn’t.
Yael Bartana
Yeah, but I think it’s also because there is dialogue in Malka. It’s all just images connected to collective memories, that are just left there together to create multiple narratives from all those signifiers. I remember when we started shooting, and I said, “Okay, we have budget problem.” So we could only pay seven soldiers to run from one place to the other. I also wanted them to look like most soldiers. It’s not like they don’t look like combat, but they’re actually hipsters from Berlin. And since they’ve never been to the army, they had to learn how to hold the gun because none of them really knew how to do it. But they did want the experience. I mean, there’s no representation of violence. I mean there is an occupation because we managed to get permission to shoot in Reichstag. But five soldiers walking in there without guns without anything wouldn’t have worked. But of course, it’s just a symbolic gesture. As for shooting on site, I think it’s always more interesting when we shoot to observed how things happens in the real time and to see the reactions. I mean, the police, the German police were completely confused seeing Israeli soldiers running next to the Reichstag and of course getting totally stressed out. That’s almost more interesting than what we filmed! Also, when we shot at the Brandenburg Gate, it was before COVID, so there were a lot of Chinese tourists who were taking selfies with the Israeli soldiers. So, there were elements of performance art that were happening in the real space, a happening in the city, where people actually experiencing and watching an act. In the in the JRMiP film trilogy, I included the reactions of the residents of the neighborhood of the former ghetto, but this time I kept it very clean, almost like you know, very sterile in a way.
Juli Carson
If folks want to join the conversation now, please do!
Liz Stringer
I have a question for Yael. I’m wondering about the collective groups you involve in the work…those performative moments where fictional actions intervene in reality. I think it fits in beautifully with what you’re just talking about, how these filmic moments on site are interceding in the lives of everyday people. For example, in Two Minutes to Midnight, you put actors into play with the experts in their fields in front of a live audience, not to mention the camera crew and others that weren’t really mentioned. I was just hoping you could speak to the various groups that were involved in this current film of Malka Germania, or even just the training that they received because that also seems to be an interesting component of the work as well.
Yael Bartana
Actually, in that way Malka Germania is not a very good example because we hired people to play the roles. No one was playing themselves the way they did in the Polish trilogy, when Slawomir Sierakowski—a leading founder of the Polish collective Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique)—was invited to write a speech (together with Kinga Dunin) to invite Jews to return back to Poland. That was the first part of the polish trilogy, delivered in an empty stadium in Warsaw, back in 2007. In real life Slawomir has the dream to make a different Poland so that it’s not 99% Catholic and white. He wanted to have the multicultural Poland he never experienced because he was a young man who grew up during Poland’s Communist time. So, we had this fantasy, that he and I fit together, that we needed each other, and we became, you know, comrades. So who he is in reality, someone wanting to make change in Poland, was who he was in the fictional JRMiP. I recently asked him, “What was your experience 10 years ago, being a young man trying to make a change?” He felt that what it did for him, when I approached him, was that he felt more Polish than ever before, because he had this very specific role. I think this is an interesting way for creating an experience—a participatory experience for people interested in questioning the real-life role they play in society. There’s the potential that art can actually help create and put forward some ideas, some acts of emancipation, that you can’t achieve in politics. For example, in Two Minutes to Midnight, 10 women sit around a table debating, with no man around. It’s an emancipatory act in that all the women are coming from very high-level jobs of expertise where they are normally in the minority, where they will never be in the majority. The artwork allows them to bring their real-world knowledge to a fictional event played out on stage where they have to produce new knowledge and debate while experiencing a situation that they’ve never been in before. You have to ask: in this fictional scenario, where they are asked to play themselves, what is their experience in the artwork? And how does that change the experience of their real-life roles? In Malka Germania we don’t have any of that in the actors, but there is the city of Berlin which plays itself, and now I look at the city in a different way. Its landscape and scenery has changed. It’s more like a dream because the Messiah enters the same gate that Napoleon did, for example. Not to mention the many, other historical events that took place on that site, like the Nazi parade. So many histories. Actually, there was one that I found quite a funny. There’s an anecdote that in 1945, when the Russian Red Army arrived to Berlin, they wanted the Camel that carried their weapons to pee on the Reichstag, as a kind of token.
Juli Carson
That is funny.
Liz Stringer
But Yael, I will slightly disagree with you that it was the city alone playing itself. When you asked the German extras to again assemble along these train tracks, you said that they were embodying this moment of redemption, where they get to sort of unite East and West. That, in itself is a really fascinating moment that occurs without dialogue. And you have to ask how does the body actually register that? Or maybe they were registering an unconscious realty that they weren’t even aware of? So, there are these moments of embodiment that I think are in synergy with the architecture that you’re mentioning too, which has a really nice back and forth, that I very much enjoyed in the film.
Are there any other questions before I ask another? Yes, Michael Dahan. Please, go for it.
Michael Dahan
Hi Yael. I curious how it’s received when you’re opening these generative spaces of ambiguity in your work, particularly in Israel, where I feel like there’s no room for ambiguity about two specific areas that you’re constantly engaging in. One is the Holocaust and one is the occupation. There’s always this resistance, on some level, to ever having a true conversation about the complexity of that issue, even though Israeli society is very critically involved in these discussions all the time. I’m just concerned about how you’ve encountered that feedback because these seem to be such difficult topics for a nation that is so engaged in the kind of discourse that would enable them to deal with all this in a critical way. But there’s always this limit to what you’re allowed and not allowed to discuss. And in terms of ambiguity, especially this seems like such a forbidden arena to be in with any kind of doubt.
Yael Bartana
Yeah, I actually thought we could have that, back in 2006, when I participated in a project called Liminal Spaces, organized by three curators, Galit Eilat and Eyal Danon and Reem Fadda. It was a series of traveling seminars that considered how art and culture might overcome barriers—political and physical—caused by the Israeli occupation. We actually sat for several days to discuss the politics, and there was no space for ambiguity. This was not allowed. It was mostly Palestinian artists criticizing a member, and debate happened there, with no space for ambiguity. I remembered the situation very strongly because I am for ambiguity even though I know it will not be very welcomed by some people. But, there, I think I discovered why I’m for ambiguity, because otherwise I would simply be an activist, not an artist, and I would have a very clear agenda and would put that agenda forward, always trying harder and harder. After that, I kind of gave up dealing with the Israeli occupation in my artwork. I mean, I had this idea of 3 million Jews back to Poland as provocation to think about the “right of return” for both Israelis and Palestinians. If I’m dealing with art—and I think there’s a lot of power in art—I really believe in image making towards this end. For example, I know I cannot stop Putin from doing these horrible acts. I know that I don’t have that power. But it’s still really important for me to take a political position of enacting ambiguity in my artwork because I’ve seen how it activates the audience. It demands that the audience get lost, to let go of their suppositions so that maybe they can find some of the answers to these large political problems for themselves. Maybe they even ask new questions. As artists and thinkers, that’s what we can do. I know writers are doing it in writing and this is how I do it in art. This is my way to create discussion, and the films should essentially be about that: creating conversations to come up with new ideas. And yes, in that context, I feel like you need Israelis and Israeli artists and, of course, there are a lot of political artists engaging public discourse this way. But there is also a lot of cynicism, there is a lot of inner sense of “Oh, my God, we cannot do anything.” That this is a lost cause, but we have to fight that feeling.
Michael Dahan
Ultimately, it seems like ambiguity doesn’t necessarily work with cynicism because ambiguity allows for the possibility of an alternative, even though you haven’t committed one way or the other. Right? The cynicism I find on the Israeli side, there’s still the possibility for hope. But there’s also cynicism on the side of a lot of artists who are working on, let’s say, the cause of Palestine who don’t see any latitude for ambiguity. They only see room for activism. You can only have one position about the occupation, and it’s the one that’s permitted. You can’t have any other position which might open things up. I think that’s why the conversation about science fiction is so interesting because science fiction is so often a metaphor for what can’t be discussed directly because there’s a contemporary danger. So, we have to find a way to cloak it in some sort of allegory, fantasy or science fiction. In your films we encounter what can’t be discussed in the guise of an openness to the situation, an ambiguity that’s more complex, then one position or the other, right.
Yael Bartana
Yes, and that’s what specifically drives the JRMiP trilogy. The last part is my least favorite, but it contains a political decision. For that, I wanted to include different voices. I wanted to hear the critique of the decision even if it’s a fictional movement. And we were criticized like we were naive. So, it was very important for me to activate multiple voices, which became the film itself. Originally, for the Venice Biennale premiere, they actually approached the Minister of Culture who signed that I can actually represent Poland. I wanted him in the film to hear why he agreed that the non-Polish person with such a project would represent Poland but…
Juli Carson
…also, the Minister of Culture from Israel, at first, refused to see the work…
Yael Bartana
…yes, but she eventually saw it. She was very happy that the leader was assassinated so the return to Poland was not going happen.
Liz Stringer
I had a question in the chat from a participant. They shared their thanks for having this conversation. But they also asked: “In Malka Germania, why did you choose to have the street signs in Hebrew and not Yiddish? Apart from the signs in your dreams being in Hebrew?” That is their question.
Yael Bartana
Why Hebrew not…
Liz Stringer
…not Yiddish?
Juli Carson
Oh, Yiddish?
Yael Bartana
That’s a good question. Why not Yiddish? Because in the State of Israel, we speak Hebrew and we don’t speak Yiddish Some people speak Yiddish but as a religious faction. And the fantasy in Malka Germania is that Berlin will turn into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Whichever city, it was that the street signs would appear as they do in Israel. And for those who cannot read the street signs, it’s actually translated as “redemption street” meets with the “occupation street.” It’s a real corner in Tel Aviv. That really exists: The Redemption, next to The Occupation. So, the street signs in Malka mirror the many, many street signs Tel Aviv and/or Jerusalem: “Prophet Street” and so forth.
Juli Carson
That’s funny given your dialogue with Michael about Israeli politics and ambiguity. The official ideological position being against ambiguity, but it’s literally on the street signs. It’s everywhere. Redemption/Occupation.
Yael Bartana
Exactly.
Liz Stringer
We have another individual in the chat who asked if you could talk about your decision to not have anyone speak in the work and to activate text thought the street signs and whatnot.
Yael Bartana
I didn’t want to narrow down the narrative to any one specific story. I wanted to keep fluid multiple narratives, letting the images work alone work towards that. To me, it felt much stronger, so it wasn’t necessary to use a language.
Liz Stringer
Building off of that, you mentioned that these were very loaded images within the collective memory, one of which is the German people walking down the train rails. I was wondering if there were other moments in the film that were culled from collective memory?
Yael Bartana
Historically?
Liz Stringer
Yes.
Yael Bartana
There are many, but I think the images related to the Reichstag are very much connected to the history of the city’s liberation as well as its occupation. There’s also all the iconic images of the soldiers in Malka, which I based on those of the 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem.
Then there’s the images on the beach, which are quite familiar images for Germans, like the iconic blue and white beach chairs. This contemporary object—this strandkorb—a reminder (and a remainder) of the ideology that the Nazis promoted, the free body, free nature, and all that, which they borrowed from German Romanticism and the ethno-national movement of the 19th century (the Völkisch movement). It made a lot of sense that Malka would find bathers there. The very linear style—you know, athletes are very connected to the history of German Nazi cinema—sometimes it’s very confusing. It really looks like a propaganda film from the 30s.
Juli Carson
I think we have time for like, maybe one or more questions or comments…But I should also say that Yael is having an opening in Stockholm on April 7, Two Minutes to Midnight will be installed. Do you want to show some images of that?
Yael Bartana
Yes, that work is from the What if Women Ruled the World Project which was actually a theater play that turned into the film Two Minutes to Midnight.
Yael Bartana
[Sharing screen to present images] Here’s the “Peace Room” from Two Minutes to Midnight. And that’s the one half-naked man.
Juli Carson
Right. So, it’s an inversion of Doctor Strangelove…all men in the War Room, which one half-naked women on the phone to her General boyfriend…
Yael Bartana
Yes. And here’s the President. Juli, you showed the film in your class, right?
Juli Carson
Yes. It’s been very well-received in Southern California in addition to UCI because it was also shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. But I’ve been showing it ever since you made it a few years ago. Thank you so much for talking with us!
Yael Bartana
Great thank you so much for inviting me. And I’m so sorry I don’t see you in person, all of you.
Juli Carson
We’ll do that another time. Sooner than you think. Okay, have a good day everybody!
[1] Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” (October, 1944) in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 138.
[2] Shelley Harten and Gregor H. Lersch, “Introduction,” The Book of Malka Germania, (Berlin: The Jewish Museum, 2021), p. 13.
[3] Emmanuel Alloa, “Pre-Enactment. About Mythical Time,” in Yael Bartana, (Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 2017), p. 73.