Yael Bartana - Farewell

We are proud to present Farewell, Yael Bartana’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show centers around her project for the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale and expands upon it with new works.

The exhibition takes its title from the video work Farewell, which portrays a ceremonial departure for the generation ship Light to the Nations, destined for distant galaxies. The ship’s launch marks a radical decision to separate from Earth—an escape from a planet exhausted by human failure -– toward an unknown future crucial for humanity’s survival. Farewell is a moment of collective grief and anticipation.

The dancers at the heart of Farewell are dressed in white garments that echo 20th-century fascist aesthetics— purity, grace, and unity. Bartana draws from this authoritarian visual language—not to celebrate it, but to expose its seductive power. Alongside movement inspired by Rudolf von Laban’s early 20th-century expressionist dance, the choreography hovers between collective ritual and ecstatic release. These references lend Farewell a haunting ambivalence: it is both a warning and a promise, emphasizing the thin line between utopia and dystopia.

As the video unfolds, Bartana carries viewers beyond the confines of Earth to the vast expanse of space, where the generation ship, Light to the Nations, floats in the cosmic void. The ship is a messianic vessel, and thus a promise of redemption. Towards the ceremony’s climax, the dancers don animal masks—a horse, a donkey, and a ram—evoking apocalyptic imagery and connecting to the Judeo-Christian messianic narrative woven throughout Bartana’s work. Farewell's ecstatic dance pre-enacts both catastrophe and hope. The forest setting reflects Light to the Nations’ imperative to grant nature a chance for rejuvenation.

A model of the generation ship Light to the Nations is on view in the exhibition, alongside a VR experience that allows visitors to glimpse life aboard the vessel. Designed by Bartana using the framework of Jewish mysticism, the ship’s structure is based on the Kabbalistic diagram of the Sephirot. Each of its ten interconnected spheres— dedicated to functions like agriculture, medicine, governance, and heritage—translates a spiritual principle into the speculative architecture. The VR experience brings viewers into the ship’s spaces, where daily life revolves around the preservation of rituals, heritage, and culture. Amidst the journey toward the unknown, continuity is sustained through practices of care and communal learning, rooted in the rhythms of diasporic life. The ship is a vessel of messianic hope, a utopian ark suspended in space. Its imagined technology is shaped by mystical cosmology. As such, Farewell envisions a departure toward realities yet unknown to humankind–a call for a new beginning which entails the end of an era.

A neon work bearing the word Homesick appears split across two lines, reading simultaneously as a declaration of longing and a grave diagnosis: home is sick. The glowing text gives form to the inescapable longing that underlies the exhibition’s exploration of departure and renewal. Homesick anchors the journey in the unresolved ache of what cannot be fully left behind—a home haunted by violence and catastrophes, no longer the place it once was.

Lamentations, a triptych from a new photographic series, is presented in this exhibition for the first time. In this work, Bartana turns to the affective and emotional resonance of separation and grief. Levitating between photography and painting, Lamentations evokes the atmospheric softness of sfumato (renaissance painting technique) and the emotional intensity of modernist expressionism. The figure—a self-portrait—appears as a half- remembered vision, its pale body dissolving into a smoky haze; in mourning, the figure undergoes a metamorphosis, shedding markers of individuality and gender. The self-portrait appears as an alien, almost unrecognizable human form, merging the trope of space travel—and its distortions of the body in zero gravity—with a lamentation for, and farewell to, a sick and distant home.

Yael Bartana (b 1970 in Israel, lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam) 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. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances, and public monuments she investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals, and collective gatherings.

Bartana’s 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 Bienniale / German Pavilion (2024); São Paulo Bienal (2014, 2010, 2006); Berlin Bienniale (2012); Venice Bienniale / Polish Pavilion (2011); Documenta 12 (2007); Istanbul Bienniale (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.