Yael Bartana

From Bartana’s early video vignettes to her most recent project What if Women Ruled the World? (2017), by way of her monumental trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11) with which she represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale, the book highlights the artist’s fascination with the ways that social rituals shape both individual identities and collective memory. Bartana’s works are themselves modeled on the aesthetics of the ritual, and are therefore performances that unapologetically seduce us. Her films draw attention to the fact that cinema is a ritual, and that the camera, perhaps better than any other device, mimics the ritualistic in its ability to fetishize, seduce and draw us into the ceremony we are watching.