Exhibitions cycle: WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? Part 2
YAEL BARTANA. WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD
March 8 - November 10, 2024
ΕΜΣΤ North and south facades
Over the past twenty years, Yael Bartana has developed an artistic practice that utilises mainly video and the moving image in order to investigate lesser-known aspects of history, as well as events that shaped collective identities and subjectivities. Her video installations are based on or make reference to historical political speeches, demonstrations, activism and other events from the present or the recent past, which are narrated, recorded, re-enacted or adapted in order to critically evaluate their impact.
Aside from her distinctive audio-visual practice, Yael Bartana creates neon light installations where quotes, statements and slogans are articulated as sculptural manifestations while retaining their symbolic reference to a yet-to-be-realised political vision. The work What if Women Ruled the World (2016) has been reconstructed as a large-scale outdoor installation, in Greek and English, on the north and south façades of the museum, posing this archetypal question to the passers-by along the Syngrou Avenue thoroughfare.
YAEL BARTANA. TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
March 8 - November 27, 2024
ΕΜΣΤ Screening Room-Mezzanine
ΕΜΣΤ also presents Two Minutes to Midnight (2021), a video based on the two-hour long 2017 performance by Bartana entitled What if Women Ruled the World? In a room that resembles the film set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), a possible nuclear threat scenario unfolds. Contrary to the film, the council of the threatened country consists only of women. Specialists, in fields like defence, peaceful activism, philanthropy and politics, investigate ways to de-escalate international crises, contemplate whether it is better to die for an act of peace than survive a pre-emptive killing, and analyse the macho aspects of war, belligerence and territorial behaviour. In this deeply anti-war work, Bartana treats serious issues with humour but also highlights practical ways of dealing with global threats in an alternative to the dominant patriarchal power system. The title of the work refers to the Doomsday clock, a clock devised by scientists as a metaphoric reference to our proximity to the world’s end. When Yael Bartana realised the work, the doomsday clock was just two minutes before midnight. Today, the clock has moved forward to predict that we are now just 90 seconds before the end of the world.
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