Yael Bartana’s Polish Trilogy

Could there have been a more apt moment for Yael Bartana to premiere her last two projects in Israel than during the concurrent celebrations of Passover and Holy Week at the beginning of the month? Both eight-day cycles commemorate and celebrate rebirth and freedom through suffering: for the Jewish faithful, the Exodus from Egypt and behind it God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would find their home in a land flowing with milk and honey; for the Christian, the prospect of life-everlasting sealed by Christ’s rising on Easter. Lest we get caught up in a sense that there’s a difference between the two, recall, please, that Jews, as far as I was taught during 15 years attending synagogue and Hebrew school, don’t believe in an afterlife, apart from the eventual coming of the Messiah, and that for many (although not the ultraorthodox) the Zionist credo of the people’s return to the land has a quasi-religious status. A recent opinion column in the English language edition of Haaretz (The Land) suggested that Israelis have achieved a kind of prophetically sanctioned freedom, akin to life-everlasting.

That potent, almost oxymoronic mix of the secular and the fervently spiritual has been the subject of Yael Bartana’s work over the last ten or so years. In examining the myths and rituals which bind Israeli society (the sense of isolation, the siege mentality), Bartana explores the irony that a sovereign nation which occupies another still feeds off a historical understanding of Jews as an unwanted minority in the countries of their origins. In her recent Polish Trilogy, begun in 2007 and of which she’s now completed two films, Bartana has moved out of the ‘Israeli’ context to examine, in the paschal sense, Egypt, the other side of the equation, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe from which Ashkenazi Jews come.

In the first work, Mary Kozsmary (Dreams and Nightmares, 2007), leftist activist Slawomir Sierakowski strides into an empty and dilapidated Warsaw stadium and delivers a startling call: "Let the 3,000,000 Jews that Poland has missed… return to Poland, to your country." Acknowledging his nation's tradition of virulent anti-Semitism, he argues that together, in a multicultural society, Poles and Jews will both overcome this legacy of hatred to create a new dynamic, diverse nation. Fat chance: the film’s setting and form quote Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), underscoring the long history of European persecution which renders a Jewish return to Poland, in a way more of homeland than Zion, an impossibility.

Yael Bartana, Mur I Weiza (Wall and Tower), 2009, film still.
Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

In the second film, Mur I Weiza (Wall and Tower, 2009), ‘pioneers’ played by Israeli and Polish volunteers dressed as Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the 1930s answer Sierakowski’s call and build a settlement in a park on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. Based on structures erected during the Arab Revolts, they construct a small compound – two workmenlike single-room cabins – within wooden walls topped by barbed wire, above which they raise a watchtower. Older Poles look on, bemused, and pass with their shopping carried in thin plastic bags or while walking their lap dogs. At night, searchlights within the camp scan the surrounding area, illuminating a monument to the Ghetto Uprising rendered in the heroically turgid style of 1950s communist commemorative sculpture. During the day, settlers learn the Polish words for ‘freedom’, ‘land’ and ‘peace’, much as immigrants to Palestine were taught Hebrew, and tutored in the narrative of return and fulfilment.

Yael Bartana, Mur I Weiza (Wall and Tower), 2009, film still.
Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

At its most straightforward, Wall and Tower suggests how the movement of Jewish settlers from Europe to Palestine was a scripted one, as artificial in its way as the return of Israelis, many with Polish roots, to Europe would be. More trenchantly, as so much of Bartana’s work does, it indicates that Israel has become a jail, confining its citizens in a self-reinforcing dynamic of isolation and confrontation out of synch with contemporary reality. Worse, the stockade in Warsaw recalls the barracks and towers in Nazi concentration camps – an intentional parallel, as Bartana confirmed when I ran into her in Tel Aviv. The similarity cuts to the internalisation of the Holocaust in the Israeli psyche and suggests that Israeli society, in its reliance on the Holocaust as a justification for its policies and as the driving force of social cohesion, simply perpetuates the marginalisation Jews endured through two millennia of Diaspora.

On the other hand, there is no avoiding the role European anti-Semitism played in the history – and hence present – of Zionism. Nor, Bartana indicates, were the Jews who settled in what became Israel much different in their aspirations for a homeland than so many other European peoples during the age of nationalism. Wall and Tower is set to the Polish and Israeli national anthems. The latter, Hatikvah (The Hope, 1888) – which is played in reverse – is a hymn to the yearning “to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem”. The former, written just after the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century, contains the similar call to “to free our fatherland from chains
”, and the promise that “we shall return….” In each there is a sense of national exceptionalism defined by denial. Bartana’s careful attention to visual detail communicates a deep respect for this substance, but her films also make clear that until such myths are seen for what they are, and all peoples take responsibility for their historical role in current realities, no nation can move forward in an ethical way.

The first two films in Yael Bartana’s uncompleted Polish Trilogy are on view at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, through 15 May