Yael Bartana

Yael Bartana, born in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, in 1970, lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination, dissected group identities and (an-)aesthetic means of persuasion. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances and public monuments, Yael Bartana investigates subjects like national identity, trauma and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.

Under the title Thresholds, Bartana co-represented Germany alongside theatre director Ersan Mondtag at the Venice Biennale 2024. This is the second time Bartana is representing a country other than Israel in the Biennale, following the exhibition of …and Europe will be stunned as the official Polish participation at the 54th Biennale in 2011. Bartana was also awarded the Rome Prize of the Villa Massimo in 2023/24, where she was in residency in 2023/24.

In 2024, the artist held solo exhibitions at Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, as well as at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Further recent solo exhibitions include Center for Digital Art (CDA) in Holon (2023), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021/2018), Jewish Museum Berlin (2021), Fondazione Modena Arte Visive in Modena (2019), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (2017), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2014), Secession in Vienna (2012) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2012).

In 2026, Bartana presented her film Farewell (2024) at Midnight Moment, Times Square, New York.

Bartana’s works are included in major museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Jewish Museum New York, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.