Curator: Noam Gal
Along the thirty years of making her internationally acclaimed film productions, artist Yael Bartana has consistently engaged with another material in her exhibitions, a material that still awaits more public and critical attention.
Neon statements that served as titles for Bartana’s projects, publicly written by the characters in her films, now take precedence at an unusual historical site. Against the dark background of the 150-year-old Wasserturm – once a municipal water reservoir, then a Nazi detention camp, then a deserted closed vault under a serene public park – these neon signs mix thought with electricity, two sources of energy we historically associate with enlightenment and progress. Inside this intense, cool well we are drawn to contemplate Bartana’s illuminating slogans not simply as individual artistic expressions, but rather as the advertisements for collective calls for action, especially today, with the fast erosion of humanism’s core ideals: the concept of History requires fixing, the term Utopia demands activation, we have ignored the gender significance of Crisis, we have not taken our own ‘Dreams‘ seriously enough. These doubts stream through the electrified tubes of a noble gas which has often served the verbal and geometric expressions of conceptualism and minimalism. Following those visual traditions, simple ideas transcend the material edges of the conventional art object, as their light spreads out to their indeterminate surroundings. These neons mimic commercial design, as if they could promote sales at any point around our commodified planet (as political agendas, indeed, seem to turn trends on and off). Yet, here, these fluorescent mottos have finally found a quieter spot, retaining their status as sheer ideas for us to take back home, even when it is so insecure.