2024-01-16 12:50:15
There it is, the news about who will be exhibiting in the German Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale from the end of April. But it was about time, truly. Some people were surprised. Most countries have long since communicated their decisions; Poland even canceled the jury’s decision, which was made under the PiS government, and made a new election.
But now it’s out: The curator for the German Pavilion 2024 and co-director of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden Çağla Ilk has decided on an entire exhibition. The Israeli artist Yael Bartana (born in Aful, born in 1970) and the German theater director Ersan Mondtag (born in West Berlin, born in 1987) will share the historically charged Nazi architecture in the Giardini.
Group exhibition “Thresolds”
In addition to the works by Bartana and Mondtag in the German Pavilion, at another location away from the Giardini, the artists and musicians Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok and Jan St. Werner will create an island called “La Certosa” – about monumentality of the German Pavilion.
Under the title “Thresholds” These “three scenarios” tell of “history and future from the perspective of different artistic positions”. According to curator Ilk, Thresholds stands for “the present as a threshold – a place where no one can stay and which only exists because something was and when something will be”.
The selection is a coup, no question, even if one could expect a lot of theatrics and performance. Ilk was a dramaturge at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater from 2012 to 2020. With Bartana and Mondtag, she has now sought out true borderline oysters, mercilessly courageous, and at times both even a bit megalomaniacal. And with Bartana, an Israeli represents Germany in Venice for the first time.
The return of the Jews
The performance and video artist dominated debates back in 2011 with her contribution to the Polish pavilion. Back then, too, it was about how we deal with history and its significance for the future: Back then, she staged a utopia, the “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland”, for which 3.3 million Jews from Israel were to return to Poland. A congress took place a year later in the Hebbel Theater in Berlin.
For some at the time it was an unbearable relocation fantasy, for others it was one of the most impressive art projects of recent years. Kolja Reichert wrote in this newspaper: “For this Europe, the confrontation with historical guilt in the promise of a Jewish return must sound like a threat.” So far, all that is known about her project in Venice is that she is “on the threshold of a present that is perceived as catastrophic “ occurs – a “world on the brink of total destruction” and deals with “alternative readings of history” and holds out the prospect of “an imaginary common future”.
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Yael Bartana could therefore, in her very own way, become a challenge to the German raison d’état to fully and faithfully defend Israel’s right to exist. But the success of the collaboration with Ersan Mondtag and the other artists represents a great opportunity, the power of which cannot be overestimated in the current situation.
Mondtag, on the other hand, wants to “counter the monumental character of the pavilion with a fragmentary, seemingly small narrative”. He will address the question of “what would happen if it were possible to revive past eras as living spaces.”
Ersan Mondtag grew up in Neukölln as the child of Turkish guest workers named Aygün. Around 2016 he was not yet the high-flyer in the German-speaking dramatic arts that he is today. But he was already making a move, with his characteristic callousness, which in the American language would simply be called coolness. The artist name was also already ready. The industry magazine “Theater Today” named him young director of the year. A theater work from Kassel, “Tyrannis,” then one from Bern, “Die Vernichtung,” subsequently made it into the Berlin Theatertreffen’s selection of ten. And yet, as he said in a Kreuzberg restaurant, he was already dreaming of higher, faster, further, of the opera, of film, of art.
Ersan Mondtag
Source: pa/DORIS SPIEKERMANN-KLAAS TSP
Ideally, he said in a personal conversation, he would like to build parallel worlds like Charlie Kaufman did with “Synecdoche, New York,” in which the great Philip Seymour Hoffman builds a theater that gradually devours space and time. When we later heard about the Russian Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who set up, or at least would have liked to set up, his megalomania installation DAU in various major cities in Europe, in which hundreds of amateur actors disappeared for months, one thought: Yes, that could also have been by Ersan Mondtag.
Our formatted free time
Shortly after abandoning his directing studies at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich, Mondtag and his trusted collaborator Olga Bach had long since built their own DAU, albeit comparatively pocket-sized: “Konkordia. Permanent Performance #1” was the name of the nine-day story during which 60 performers from the group Kapitæl Zwei Kolektif in 2013 subjected themselves to “a strict set of rules for acting, communicating and living together,” as it was called. Orders were issued and barefoot they were followed. An agenda item could be something like: “9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.: KONKORDIA is having fun – concerts, theater and cinema.”
How formatted our free time is, how integrated it is into the social context of productivity, is a recurring theme at Mondtag. The Bern production “The Annihilation” – one of the best works we have seen from him – was a quasi-fascist, post-apocalyptic self-exploitation mirage in which self-optimization slogans were superimposed over constantly pumping bodies and techno beats. Harmony Korine’s experimental film “Aggro Dr1ft” came six years later. “Annihilation” already had all of it in 2017.
The stage performer does whatever he wants since he entered the scene; When he was still very young he went straight to the big guys, to Peymann, Castorf and the brilliant directing duo Vegard Vinge/Ida Müller. At times, envious people said that his aesthetics were based heavily on his role models and teachers. But he was wiser than their complaints and always turns them into something new.
Silence of the cultural scene
And so Mondtag is a man of clear words as well as clear visions; He has something to say and finds a form for it, often together with Olga Bach. After the horror day in Israel on October 7, 2023, it took him less than three days before he sent out a tweet that even more undecided colleagues have not been able to bring themselves to do to this day: “The hostility that you get from parts of the cultural scene because of the condemnation of Hamas’s barbaric act was manipulated, among other things. I honestly find it unbearable. We have a very big problem in the scene that we need to talk about.”
Yael Bartana
Source: Andreas Poulakos
In the meantime, he will have discussed the topic with Yael Bartana and, together with her, will look for – and find – an artistic form for the now burning questions. As a duo, they have one of the most difficult tasks: making art together in the German Pavilion in the year of the Israel-Gaza war. Everything will be read one way, no matter how mythical-magical-cool their work appears.
Because we know from Yael Bartana: The production is one thing, the political message is another. The artist was born not far from the Golan Heights into a family that she once described as torn apart – between Zionists and secularists. She brought this conflict with her to Europe and made everything that is historically connected to it a theme again and again in her art.
Jewish in the Diaspora
Like Ersan Mondtag, she tests boundaries and provokes with taboos in order to bring out the very last, deeply buried good and evil longings and memories. Her artistic perspective is extremely interesting: it is that of a secular Israeli who says that she was raised to love the land of Israel, but only felt Jewish when she moved to Europe, to the “diaspora”. She has been looking for redemption ever since.
In 2021, Yael Bartana had her largest solo exhibition to date at the Jewish Museum in Berlin: “Redemption now”. Her monumental video installation “Malka Germania,” which she developed specifically for the museum, is difficult to endure. An androgynous woman in a white robe and white hair floats through the film as if she were an incarnation from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia”, always filmed from below, horribly smooth and heroic in aesthetics, combined with a bit of Lord of the Rings.
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But is it a quote? Which “redeemer” does Yael Bartana send us? In the film she appears with Israeli soldiers who give Nostitzstrasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg a Hebrew name and strangely playfully occupy Berlin. In the end, Albert Speer’s architectural capital city dream emerges from Wannsee, like Atlantis from the ocean – and the viewer is left perplexed.
“Germania” in the German Pavilion
Source: Felix Hörhager/dpa/archive image
In memory of the exhibition in the Jewish Museum, the German Pavilion seems to be the perfect place for Yael Bartana to work on Nazi history, the “Germania” lettering on the architrave. And she will do it differently than everyone before her. Many artists have already tried rejecting it, rewriting it or deleting it entirely, tearing out the floor or just playing on the roof.
But Yael Bartana will perhaps be the first artist who is not afraid of guilt, propaganda, historical trauma, and political symbols. And Mondtag doesn’t shy away from confrontation, but is aware of his responsibility. What we will do with the result of the collaboration, how the public will react to it, whether it will convince them, be too much, upset, break taboos, we will know after April 20th, when the 60th Venice Art Biennale opens.
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