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Bartana, Yael
Born 1970, IsraelLives in Israel and the Netherlands
IN THE GALLERY
Disembodying the National Army Tune, 2001
The reprise of an installation first exhibited by the artist in Israel in 2001, the piece is now positioned at the entrance to the Kellen Gallery. A loudspeaker on a 13-foot pole plays a recording of the Israeli national anthem in the voice of a person imitating a trumpet. Triggered by the viewers’ movements, the loudspeaker climbs up and down the pole, simulating the raising and lowering of a flag and emphasizing a phallic subtext to patriotic displays. The work satirizes tropes of nationhood that are arrived at through pomp and ceremony.
Soundtrack: Keren Rosenbaum
Voice: Noa Frenkel
Production Assistance: Yuval Kedem
PERFORMANCES
Wild Seeds in America, 2008
Performance: Sunday, October 19
10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Union Square South
New work, commissioned by Parsons for "OURS"
In the first "Wild Seeds," Yael Bartana filmed a group of 18-year-old Israeli pacifists playing a game called the “Evacuation of Gilad’s Colony,” based on Israel’s forced removal of Jewish settlers from the Occupied Territories. Against a breathtaking rural backdrop, the participants tried to resist and break away from two of their own teammates who had volunteered to act as “authorities.” The game’s serious subtext became more explicit as the players’ language mimicked the actual words used by the evacuated settlers.
In "Wild Seeds in America," the game is repeated, but this time as a commissioned performance against the urban backdrop of New York City, with New School students who learn the original context of the game in progressive stages. The experiment looks at how one society’s rituals and behaviors of dissent are received outside of their original social context, and how knowledge shapes that experience. In a broader context, it is a portrait of a community that declares its ideology in opposition to the policy of the state.
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