Galleria Raffaella Cortese continues its exploration of Yael Bartana’s work with a solo exhibition featuring the Italian premiere of an audiovisual installation, coinciding with the artist’s participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as a co-representative of the German Pavilion with the project Light to the Nations.
The exhibition, held in the space of Via Stradella 7, represents a further advancement in Bartana’s visionary journey of exploring the interplay between utopia and dystopia. It continues her in-depth investigation into humanity’s capacity for hope, the potential redemption of our species, and the preservation of the world that sustains us. With her project Light to the Nations, Bartana explores humanity’s escape towards a chimeric and uncertain space where the salvageable regains renewed energy.
The exhibition will feature Bartana’s new video work, Mir Zaynen Dor! (We Are Here!), 2024, commissioned by the Jewish-Brazilian art space Casa do Povo, prominently positioned as the first auspicious step of the entire utopian journey of the exhibition.
This work is primarily based on the relationship between the sung word and the collective choreography of a choir, between past and present, between memory and “pre-enactment.” Bartana brings together two groups from two different Brazilian diasporas: Coral Tradição, a choir whose origins trace back to the now-destroyed Yiddishland (transnational Jewish territory that extended in Eastern Europe and defined itself through the use of the Yiddish language), and Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street music ensemble whose production draws from Candomblé culture and the Maroon communities (quilombo).
An invitation to imagine new collective bodies beyond fixed identity labels. A true exercise in possible and hopeful alliances aimed at constituting part of the community of the future where the power of song and dance regains its primordial value.
The work Generation Ship, is a model of the spaceship Light to the Nations. The model is a promise of salvation, symbolizing Bartana’s acclaimed project at the Biennale and the centerpiece of her futuristic vision, representing the concrete possibility of departure. The Generation Ship is designed based on the “Ten Sefirot” of Jewish Kabbalah, a diagram composed of the ten Sephirot (tree of life), the kabbalah’s main image expressing the ten facets of God.
Overlaying imagined technologies with mystical doctrines, Yael Bartana considers the Generation Ship as something that preserves life and tradition, a vehicle for new life in space. Since the travelers will live on this spaceship for eons, it must be able to sustain human existence in its fullness, allowing its inhabitants to evolve, change, grow, develop new technologies, preserve their culture, and create a new one. The Generation Ship is composed of ten spheres, including: heritage and history, public space, agriculture, recycling, living quarters, education, recreation. The other spheres will be developed in the future.
The neon work Utopia Now!, prominently displayed in the exhibition space, serves as a direct and immediate invitation to reflect on the concept of utopia in the present, highlighting the contrast and tension between hope and disillusionment that permeates the entire show.
Facing the generation ship Light to the Nations, four large photographs of Roman pine trees Pinus (1,2,3,4) now at risk of extinction and almost ghostly in appearance, suggest a dystopian future. As we proceed towards the unknown, uncertainty manifests in blurred forms, and these trees appear, whispering of movements and hinting at a new world, or perhaps a world destined to vanish.
