Yael bartana

Through her moving image and installation works, Yael Bartana explores how cultural and national identity is reinforced through rituals, ceremonies, and social practices. Born in Israel, Bartana frequently takes her native country as a case study, considering how cultural narratives and collective memory operate within the Israeli national consciousness.

Drawing from this tradition, Bartana invited both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, and more recent ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan and Eritrea to cast off possessions that materially connect them to a traumatic past. In the work, a cascade of these objects—including clothing, framed photos, identification documents, and medals—fall across the screen in slow motion, released from an unseen height.

A pitch-black backdrop creates a feeling of limitless space, disconnecting the objects from a specific time or place. Moving through the air with balletic fluidity, the free-falling items become performative actors, standing in for the people to whom they belong and visually representing the diasporas that form when ethnic groups are subjected to violence and forced migration.

Yael bartana german pavilion

Through mingling the histories of different twentieth-century genocides, the film points out how identity has been repeatedly weaponized in order for certain groups of people to gain political and economic power over others. Instead, she reveals political conditions and mechanisms, inviting her audience to be active viewers and participants. With Tashlikh Cast Off , Bartana proposes a new kind of ritual wherein discarding objects releases participants from the burden of painful histories, and facilitates the acknowledgement of guilt, emotional healing, and psychological liberation.

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Yael bartana cv

She was the winner of the second award of the Prix de Rome and the winner of the Artes Mundi Prize. Her work is held in museum collections in Europe, the United States, and Israel. Part of the exhibition. Home Dig deeper. Profile — Nov 23, Yael Bartana, "Tashlikh Cast Off ",