Yael Bartana / What if Women Ruled the World
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Film screening series showcasting Yael Bartana’s movies: “2 Minutes to Midnight,” “Mir Zayden Do!,” “The Undertaker.”

“What if women ruled the world?” Yael Bartana stages the question in her performative ‘Two Minutes to Midnight,’, where an all women government of a fictitious country must take a stand on an imminent nuclear threat from a foreign nation. A panel of fictional characters and real women experts in fields such as defence, law, politics and psychology is set in a democratic ‘Peace Room’, mirroring the toxically masculine ‘War Room’ in Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War satire, ‘Dr. Strangelove.’  The women are tasked with deciding how to approach the prescripted situation. Bartana’s visionary work is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary four-year process that analyses the geopolitical power game – and presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse.

“Mir Zayden Do!” brings together two groups from two different diasporas: Coral Tradição, a Jewish Brazilian choir born from the now-destroyed Yiddishland (a nation whose borders were defined by the reach of the Yiddish language itself), and Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street music ensemble that stems from Candomblé culture. In an exercise of weaving new possible alliances, Bartana’s video is an invitation to imagine the emergence of collective bodies beyond fixed identity labels.

In “The Undertaker,” an armed procession is led through historical locations in the city center of Philadelphia, finally arriving to Laurel Hill cemetery to perform a symbolic burial ritual of various weapons from different times. The performance incorporates elements from a 1953 choreography by the Israeli movement-composer Noa Eshkol (1924-2007).