What and what would Berlin be today if it was not the Red Army units but the Israeli soldiers who liberated the city from the Nazis?
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Large-format video installations will be displayed at the Jewish Museum in front of the exhibition “Yael Bertana – Redemption Now”.
Israeli artist Yael Bertana follows this idea through associations, mind games, and dream sequences. Her impressive work “Malka Germania” is the center of the exhibition “Redemption Now”, which will be on display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin from June 4 to October 10, 2021.
A work exhibition featuring 50 works from two decades
Salvation Now is the first retrospective of 50-year-old Bartana, who lives in Berlin and Amsterdam. More than 50 works such as video works, photographs and light sculptures from the past two decades can be viewed – and heard with equal power.
Bartana is also best known for her contribution to the Polish Pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2011. In a critical review of Polish-Jewish history, she has allowed millions of Jews to return to one of their important countries of origin and with which political movements interact. In addition to the video trilogy, the Jewish Museum presents a kind of archive with objects related to the creation and influence of the work.
The Yearning for Collective Redemption in ‘Germanic Malacca’
“Malka Germania”, Hebrew for Queen Germania, has been commissioned for the current exhibition. Bartana addresses the yearning for collective redemption after shared fears. The central character is an androgynous Christian character who at first seems to turn everyday scenes into fantasies. Photographs of tracks, bags, and groups of people link the historical persecution of the Jews as well as current images of refugees.
Pictures from Berlin today are repeatedly associated with symbols of the Nazi era, and nothing can be separated from the inherited past. The anti-Semitic swamp lies beneath an everyday scene in the Wannsee lido: In computer animation, Bartana allows Albert Speer’s Nazi design for a giant “Hall of the People” to grow on water. Amazed, surprised, mired in half-naked swimmers, Israeli soldiers and Christ alike. One of the strengths of “Malka Germania” is that Bartana leaves plenty of leeway for interpretation and correlation.
© SMB / Sandra Steiß
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Source: dpa
| Updated: Tuesday, June 1, 2021 4:22 PM
