Yael Bartana b. 1970

Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings. 

Yael Bartana's (b. 1970 in Israel, lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam) work has been exhibited worldwide, including solo exhibitions at Gammel Strand, Copenhagen (2024); Jewish Museum Berlin (2021); Fondazione Modena Artivisive (2019/2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Secession, Vienna (2012); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2012); Louisiana (2012); Moderna museet, Malmö (2010), and MoMa PS1, New York (2008).

Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale / German Pavilion (2024); São Paulo Biennale (2014, 2010, 2006); Berlin Biennale (2012); Venice Biennale / Polish Pavilion (2011); Documenta 12 (2007); Istanbul Biennale (2005), and Manifesta 4 (2002).

Bartana was awarded the Artes Mundi 4 Prize (2010) and the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned was ranked as the 9th most important art work of the 21th century by the Guardian newspaper (2019).

Yael Bartana is represented in the collections of MoMa, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.