09 march 2025, Wouter van den Eijkel
Preview Art Rotterdam | Yael Bartana's new film "Mir Zaynen Do!"
With an uncertain gait, an elderly woman walks down stairs. She is holding onto the banister with her right hand. In the background, a text is shown in a language similar to German and Dutch, but which you cannot quite understand. The lady shuffles to the stage, turns to the empty hall and bows. For a few more seconds, there is silence, followed by music.
It is the opening scene of "Mir Zaynen Do! (We are here!)", a new film by Israeli artist Yael Bartana. The film, commissioned by Jewish art space Casa do Povo from São Paulo, Brazil, is on display at Art Rotterdam in the Projections section. A sculpture by Bartana is also on display in Sculpture Park and a solo show of Bartana's work is on view at the Amsterdam gallery. The artist has been represented by Annet Gelink for more than 20 years. It is her seventh solo exhibition at the gallery and the first since 2020.
Yael Bartana represented Germany at last year's Venice Biennale with an impressive installation in the German Pavilion as part of a duo presentation with Ersan Mondtag. Her presentation was complex and extensive, covering three rooms of the pavilion and marked by contrasts: optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia, sci-fi and age-old traditions.
In the first, green-lit room was a seven-meter-long scale model of a spaceship. The other rooms included the film Farewell, drawings and a 3D model of the spaceship. In those spaces, it became clear what the spaceship was referring to: offering visitors a way out from a world on the brink of ecological and political destruction somewhere in the near or not-so-distant future.
Yael Bartana, Mir Zaynen Do (We Are Here!) (still), 2024, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Petzel Gallery, New York; Capitain Petzel, Berlin & Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm. Photo: Pablo Saborido
The press hailed the German pavilion as one of the highlights of the Biennale. The New York Times included it as one of the ‘8 Hits of the Venice Biennale’. Other leading publications mentioned the German pavilion among their highlights, including The Art Newspaper and ARTnews.
Yael Bartana (Israel, 1970) studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and came to Amsterdam in 2001 to participate in the Rijksakademie residency programme. Her work has been exhibited at numerous locations around the world and is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim, MoMA, Tate and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In the Netherlands, her work has been acquired by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum and Van Abbemuseum. Bartana lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. In her films, installations, photography and performances, she explores issues of national identity, trauma and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials and public rituals.
"Mir Zayen Do!" is no exception. Many of these elements are covered in the 11 minutes of the film. For example, the language we hear is Yiddish and the theatre where it is filmed is Casa do Povo’s auditorium, which was one of the strongholds of resistance to Brazilian dictatorship in the 70s. The older lady – dressed in black with a pearl necklace – is the conductor of Coral Tradição, a Yiddish choir from Casa do Povo that has been singing lullabies and protest songs for decades.
After a few minutes, other people appear in the doorway: someone wearing a halo made of branches, a black man with a bare torso and long skirt and a woman who appears to be wearing a traditional West African robe. They are members of llú Obá De Min, a women-led Afro-Brazilian percussion group that plays music connected with their ancestry. They sit down in the dilapidated theatre seats.
Yael Bartana, Mir Zaynen Do (We Are Here!) (still), 2024, courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Petzel Gallery, New York; Capitain Petzel, Berlin & Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm. Photo: Pablo Saborido
The film introduces us to two groups that share a common diasporic identity, even though we know they have very different histories and realities. They were both displaced (or forced to move from their home countries), but managed through collective singing and music to preserve their culture, beliefs and rituals to continue to survive.
The title is a direct quote from a Yiddish poem known as the Hymn of Partisans (Hirsch Glik, 1943). It can also be understood as an appeal to those left behind. But given how the film ends, this title can also be considered encouragement to develop new identities – on top of the old ones – in a relatively new environment. During the second half of the film, a hybrid of Ilú's drumming and the choral singing of Coral Tradição is heard and the boundaries between the two are blurred.
- "Mir Zaynen Do!" by Yael Bartana can be seen at Art Rotterdam from 27-30 March in the Projections section.
- The gallery exhibition will be on view from 15 March to 10 May at the Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.
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