Yael Bartana

Yael Bartana
Yael Bartana, 2013
Born	1970 Kfar Yehezkel, Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Education	Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
Known for	Video art
Movement	Israeli art

Yael Bartana (Hebrew: יעל ברתנא‎‎; born 1970, Kfar Yehezkel, Israel) is an Israeli artist working in film, installation and photography. Her work investigates "the imagery of identity and the politics of memory." She is perhaps best known for the film trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, which premiered at the Polish pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale and explores notions of identity and nationalism inherent to the right of return. She is based in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Tel Aviv.

Bartana received a BFA in photography from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Academy, Jerusalem, a MFA in 1999 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beelden de Kunsten in Amsterdam for two years, ending in 2001.

Yael Bartana’s films, film installations and photographs challenge the national consciousness that is propagated by her native country of Israel. Bartana focuses her work on the implied meanings of terms related to "homeland", "return", and "belonging".

Bartana's platform for investigation includes ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of countries. Working outside the country, she observes it from a critical distance. Her early films were primarily registrations in which aesthetic interventions, including soundtracks, slowing the image and specific camera perspectives, played a role. The Israeli artist first became interested in exploring the nation of Poland four years ago, when she began her trilogy of films And Europe Will Be Stunned, which examines 19th and 20th-century Europe as a historic homeland for Ashkenazi Jews. In recent years, she has increasingly staged her films, and proposed utopic narratives for new chapters of history.