Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., May 01, 2008 Nisan 26, 5768 | | Israel Time: 17:09 (EST+7) web haaretz.com   Back to Homepage Rosner's Domain Diplomacy Defense Jewish World Opinion National Print Edition Advertising Books Arts & Leisure Business Real Estate Easy Start Travel Week's End Anglo File

'Breaking the wall of indifference' By Aviva Lori Tags: Yael Bartana, Warsaw Ghetto To the sounds of the Polish national anthem, left-wing publicist Slawomir Sierakowski strides into the huge, empty stadium in Warsaw. In a fire-breathing speech, he asks three million Jews to return to the homeland to help the Poles deal with their nightmares, and invites them to gather together under the thin blanket the Poles stole from a Jewish girl 60 years ago. "It's Leni Riefenstahl-style, just turned inside out," says video artist Yael Bartana about her latest work, "Mary Koszmary" ("Nightmare"). "An appearance like that of Hitler, but instead of expelling the Jews he's calling on them to return. At the screening it was really exciting. The audience was very confused. People came to speak to me; they didn't know whether to take it seriously or not." The partly amusing, partly bleak film is a reaction to the wave of nostalgia and longing for Jews - a new fashion among part of the intellectual public in Poland, in light of the monolithic nature of their society and culture today. The 11-minute film was shown six months ago at the Pompidou Center in Paris, in January it was shown at the highly regarded Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, and later this year it will be screened in Spain, Luxembourg and at the Tate Modern in London. Israeli-born Bartana, 37, also wanders among countries and continents. She is continually packing and unpacking. In recent years she has been changing addresses. Searching for a homeland. An identity. A home. At one point she thought she'd found her place in the United States, but then she ended up moving to Amsterdam. She also lived for a little while in Sweden, then returned to Israel, spent time in Turkey and Poland, and returned once more. Now she has settled, temporarily at least, on the line between Tel Aviv and Amsterdam. In both cities she is a sought-after artist, but not only there. Last year, Bartana won the Gottesdiener Prize, and three of her video works were presented at the Tel Aviv Museum in a solo exhibition. In October, she will have a solo show at the New York space PS1; meanwhile, two weeks ago, her "Short Memory" show opened at the Kalisher Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Advertisement Bartana is a one-woman anthropological delegation. Each project is accompanied by meticulous research. In her video works, some of which are documentaries, she casts an in-depth and ironic look upon social and political rituals, as, for example, in "Declaration" from 2005, in which a young man in a white undershirt rows out to the Andromeda Rock in Jaffa and replaces the Israeli flag there with an olive tree. In "Wild Seeds," which was filmed in the territories, Bartana directed teenage boys and girls in a made-up game called "Evacuation of Havat Gilad." Slawomir Sierakowski, editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine, and journalist-sociologist Kinga Dunin worked together with Bartana, adopting her ideas and text and translating them into Polish in order to realize the film "Mary Koszmary." Sierakowski heads a group of journalists, intellectuals and writers who are trying to establish a new left in Poland, and he is currently working on a national project: automatic restoration of the citizenship of all those who were expelled from or have left Poland. "We think it's a disgrace that immigrants are standing in line, like beggars at the door, at all kinds of consulates and embassies around the world and asking to get their citizenship back," he said in an interview about two months ago in Warsaw. What do you need the Jews for? Sierakowski: "We are Adolf Hitler's dream- come-true: 100 percent Polish-speaking, we have the same colors, we're all alike, in literature, culture, architecture. Everything's so homogeneous that it gives rise to cultural degeneration like incest does and has implications for all kinds of things, such as a very homophobic and negative attitude toward women, homosexuals, abortions. There were once 400,000 Jews in my city and today you can cross all of Warsaw without knowing that other people ever lived here. You don't hear Yiddish in the streets, there's no Jewish literature, there are no leftist Jewish traditions, no architecture, no customs, no cuisine. To me it seems crazy. I think about the difference between the country I was born in and the country in which I could have been born. At every opportunity we had, we threw out the Jews. And this is what's absurd, because most of the intelligentsia was Jewish, which means that we tossed the baby out with the bathwater." Bartana's Polish project is funded mostly by the French fashion house Hermes, which sponsors various artistic undertakings. A curator from the company commissioned works from eight video artists to be presented in a specially designed, tent-like space that is transported to different museums in Europe. Bartana was one of the eight. "In 2000, I went on a trip to Poland with the academy in Holland where I was studying," she says. "It was my first time there and it was very moving. Afterward, the owners of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw came to visit my studio in Amsterdam and that's how the connection began. They asked what I was interested in and said they really wanted me to do some sort of project in Poland. It really thrilled me. Besides the fact that my grandfather was born there, I had no real connection with Poland, but I had a lot of intellectual curiosity about it. I really wanted to understand the education we receive here about Poland and about the Holocaust. The Poles were always saying that there's something very similar about Israelis and Poles, and I was also very intrigued by trying to understand that." And did you come to understand it? Bartana: "I think so. There, too, as with us, there's a small percentage of intellectuals, and a small left, as in Israel. Both we and they are a nation living with the trauma of the past and constantly struggling with the search for its identity and definition, and there is a tremendous drive for change." Since then, Bartana has made many trips to Poland. Each time, she spent several weeks there, and at the end, would ask herself, as Sierakowski and his friends do: Where are the Jews? "I felt that there were no Jews, I absorbed it on a very personal level. Wherever you go you hear, 'There used to be Jews here and there used to be Jews there' and now there's nothing, it's all erased, so it made me think of certain questions, such as: How would Israel look without Arabs?" The idea she came up with was to make a propaganda film preaching the return of the Jews to Poland. "When they first heard the idea they were completely taken aback, but afterward they were very enthusiastic about it. The work process was very long. I requested that they introduce me to a lot of people and I started tossing out the idea and hearing reactions. That's how I work when creating a transparency of a place. When I met Sierakowski there was an immediate click between us. He related to the idea and we had a lot of talks about it. I wanted it to remain solely on the provocative level. Now I'm working on the sequel in which the Jews return to Poland and what happens then." And what happens then? "I haven't decided yet." The solution Bartana came up with for the lack of Jews in Poland is surprising in its creativity. "When you were gone, we were pleased, we told ourselves: At last, we're alone," Sierakowski thunders in the video, in his speech before an empty stadium. "But since we still weren't happy, we always found some Jew to get rid of. Even when it was clear that there were no more of you, there were always some who were still trying to get rid of you. And then what happened? Today, when we look with boredom upon faces that are so similar, we know that we can't live alone. We need the other and no other is dearer to us than you. So come, take with you what you have and what you're missing. We miss you. With one language we don't know how to speak, with one religion we aren't able to hear. With one color, we can't see, with one culture, we can't feel. Without you we can't even remember." In the background, a group of Polish Scouts, in a kind of paraphrase of the Hitler Youth movement, are writing in white chalk on the grass the sentence: "Three million Jews could change the lives of 40 million Poles." The media in Poland gave the film wide and favorable coverage. After it was shown in January at the Foksal Gallery, it got very positive feedback in other places in Poland. Some months ago, a Polish curator, Kamil Malinowski, contacted Bartana and told her that in February, at the New Museum - a museum of contemporary art in Manhattan - there would be a showing of new video works by Polish artists. He asked her to take part in the project with her film. Bartana said she'd be glad to come, but had to explain to the curator that she was not a Polish artist. Yael Bartana earns a living from the prizes she has received (the Gottesdiener Prize, the Foundation for Excellence to Encourage Young Artists Prize, the Ministry of Education Prize, and prizes from different foundations in Germany, Holland and Israel), and from the sale of her films to private collectors and museums in Israel and abroad. The starting price is 10,000 euros, with a maximum of six copies per film. Her work can be found, among other places, at the Herzliya Museum, at museums in Holland, the Tate Modern in England, the Israel Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the St. Gallen Museum in Switzerland. Bartana was born in Afula and grew up in Kfar Yehezkel. Her father was a veterinarian and her mother was a teacher. The family surname is composed of the initials of Torah scholar Ben Rabbi Tanchum Esh, and was invented by her grandfather, Dr. Avraham Bartana, a deputy director of the Education Ministry and principal of the Gymnasia Rehavia high school, who came from Russia. After her discharge from the army, she spent eight months touring Africa on her own, traveling from Kenya to South Africa. "At first I thought I'd go on safari, but I soon realized that what really interested me were the people and the experience of time there, which is so different than anything I was accustomed to." When she returned to Israel, she was accepted in the photography department at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. "As a girl I had no connection to art," she continues. "My father was a photography aficionado, and because of his influence, the field interested me since I was a child." At the end of her studies, she won a prize for her final project ("It was an honor - a little money and a certificate to hang on the wall"), a five-minute video presentation. "Only a few students finished with this kind of video project," she says. "Most people did work with stills. I put the lecturers in the room for five minutes and screened this work for them which goes 'right to the veins' - the sound of people playing recorders, which has undergone manipulation, together with the screening of figures on three monitors, a small light that turns into ants. A kind of photomontage that's a little banal, abstract and frightening." Six months after completing her studies at Bezalel, in late 1996, Bartana was disappointed with the local art scene and packed her bags for the U.S. - without any prior planning and with no intention of working in art. "From Bezalel, as everyone knows, you come out with no professional training. So all I did was pass the time and I supported myself by designing Web sites in New York and California," she says. In 1999, Bartana decided to go back to school and was accepted at the School for Visual Arts in New York, but she left after just one semester and moved to Amsterdam, where she was accepted into a prestigious program at the Royal Academy of Art that enables artists from all over the world to focus on their art without having to worry about supporting themselves. The program lasts for two years and provides lodging, a living stipend, a studio, advisers and plenty of attention. "If you take advantage of this opportunity, in terms of promoting your career, it's fantastic," she says. "And that's what happened to me there. At the end of each year they have an 'open studio,' where curators come from all over the world looking for young talents." Her first solo show was held at the Gent monastery in Belgium, while she was still in school. In 2001, she created the film "Trembling Time" (Bartana gives all of her films English titles, because she feels more comfortable with the language), which garnered a lot of attention and was later screened in Israel and other countries. The film shows cars on the Ayalon Highway on the eve of Memorial Day, moments before the sounding of the siren. When it goes off, the cars stop, the drivers get up and stand at attention and right afterward get back in their cars and keep driving. Seven minutes of a trivial, annual ceremony for the Israeli viewer "that is science fiction for the non-Israeli viewer, to whom they look like aliens," she explains. "I'm intrigued by social, military and national rituals. I want to examine how rituals build a place's identity." Her 2003 "Kings of the Hill" documents a meeting of 4X4-vehicle enthusiasts that takes place every Friday on the dunes by Tel Baruch in one of the most Israeli rituals imaginable. "I filmed it over the course of a month and a half. For some reason, they thought I was from the Green Patrol [an environmental group]. It's an amateur anthropologist's take on a tribe that's performing its rites. To me, these encounters are a metaphor for the occupation and exaggerated Israeli machismo." Although Bartana shot all but two of her films in Israel, out of choice ("The necessary materials are here and the personal point of view that's so important to me can only be developed in a familiar place"), her attitude toward Israel is like that of a disappointed lover. The motif of the occupation appears in a majority of her work, sometimes overtly, sometimes not; she does not hide her critical point of view from the viewer. Everything with you is very political. "I'm not an enemy of Israel, as some people wrote in notes they left for me at the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum. But when I was abroad, I noticed something that really bothered me and that's how people can so easily ignore things that are happening here. The purpose in my films is showing them where they live - breaking the wall of indifference. I'm still an artist, I'm absolutely not a politician, and I do what I do out of a love for this place." Bartana's film "Summer Camp" was presented last year at the Docomenta Festival in Kassel, Germany and also shown at the exhibition at the Kalisher. It was filmed in the summer of 2006 following her exposure to lectures and tours given by the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions. "It was the first time I met Jeff Halper, an American-born Israeli professor who founded this organization. I was curious about their activism. I got in touch with him and he agreed to have me come film their fourth summer camp. For two weeks, they built a house for a Palestinian family in Anata, to replace the house that was demolished. I filmed them for nine days and I knew that I would do something with it in the style of 1930s' propaganda films, a style that was influenced by German Expressionism, Bolshevism and social-realism, which means an intensification of the image, as Leni Riefenstahl did, for example." The inspiration for "Summer Camp" was a 1933 film by the late Swiss-born Jewish filmmaker Helmar Lerski, called "Avodah" ("Labor"), a silent Zionist propaganda film about building the country and making the wilderness bloom. Bartana took the soundtrack from there and created a theoretical synthesis of an object and its opposite. What fascinates you about propaganda films? "I'm fascinated by how much power and faith there is in this manipulation, and how it's possible to become addicted to it and to believe in it and the effect that it has. For me, too, it's a constant war. On the one hand, I'm also influenced by this manipulation, and on the other, I want to examine how it works. For example, take the saying: 'We came to Israel to build and be built.' I take it out of its context and plant it in another context with contemporary messages. That's what fascinates me." Perhaps it's because of the things you do that you got those notes calling you an enemy of Israel? "As a creative person, I take responsibility and show what's going on here. It's a shame that there aren't more leftists who take responsibility here. If only there was a stronger and more influential left here. But with all the criticism I get, this is still my home and I don't really think that as I video artist I can fix anything. Art is a choice." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Clear, present danger Survey : 52% of youth believe Israel faces existential threat. Feeling guilty Europe's criticism of Israel is more than just anti-Semitism.

Read & React IDF chief leads 10,000 young Jews in March of the Living at Auschwitz Responses: 70 Israel Harel: Jewish guilt over Gaza deaths weakens us in fight for Israel's existence Responses: 93 Palestinians: IDF kills 62-year-old Gazan; 9 Qassams hit Negev Responses: 36 Mofaz, at Yale: Iran could have nuke bomb technology this year Responses: 21 Survey: 52% of Israeli teens say Israel faces existential threat Responses: 18 More Headlines 16:09 IDF chief leads 10,000 young Jews in March of the Living at Auschwitz 16:27 Palestinians: IDF kills 62-year-old Gazan; 9 Qassams hit Negev 17:02 Hamas TV claims 'Satanic Jews' planned, perpetrated Holocaust 16:22 Zoo refuge: Amsterdam menagerie hid Jews from the Nazis 16:36 South Africa withdraws request to host 'Durban 2' conference 14:12 Jihad: We won't sign cease-fire, but won't be first to violate it 12:03 Son gets Dad's Auschwitz tattoo on own arm 16:38 Erekat: Abbas 'doing very, very well' after heart procedure 13:56 Mofaz, at Yale: Iran could have nuke bomb technology this year 16:41 Ex-kidnap victim: Austria's Nazi past contributed to abuse cases 14:14 Truce Deal / Hamas claims victory 13:46 What did concentration camp inmates dream about? Previous Editions Select Day 30 apr 29 apr 28 apr 27 apr 25 apr 24 apr 23 apr 22 apr 21 apr 20 apr 18 apr 17 apr

Special Offers Advertisement Pardes Institute Summer Sessions http://www.pardes.org.il/ FAREWELL ISRAEL New Film The Coming War for Islamic Revival - View Movie Trailer The interest rates haven't changed But your profits will! Learn Hebrew online with Israel's best teachers Sign up for a trial lesson today Free the Palestinians from: Corrupt Kleptocracy, Tyrannical Theocracy, Abysmal Anarchy Fattal Hotel Chain Perfectly located hotels on best resorts of Israel. ISRAEL BONDS Build Israel Israel bonds - a multi-purpose way to celebrate Israel's 60th Eldan Rent a Car Israel's leading car rental company offers you a 20% discount on all online reservations Junkyard Junk a car - get free towing nationwide and a tax-deductible receipt

Home | TV | Print Edition | Diplomacy | Opinion | Arts & Leisure | Sports | Jewish World | Underground | Site rules |

Real Estate in Israel

Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.

© Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved