Yael Bartana / What If Women Ruled The World
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Arriving at a moment of unprecedented worldwide flux, internationally acclaimed artist, Yael Bartana brings some of the world’s best strategic minds together to help avert impending disaster. Bartana uses a fictional scenario to examine real life issues. Each night, she brings together actors with a group of international women in Dr Strangelove’s War Room: defence advisers, soldiers, peace activists, humanitarians, politicians and leading thinkers. Together they will spend the evening attempting to solve the global emergency, and stop the Doomsday Clock from reaching midnight.

Join us in the war room.

“This engrossing information experience becomes electric with thought. Topical, urgent and essential in these days of wild political cataclysms. Bringing together some of the best minds in their field, this gathering of expert women dare to explore the ramifications of decisions taken by men and bring issues and proposals into sharp focus for a real world in which women are frequently at the front line and the targets of terror, abuse, mind control and ideology. Yael Bartana brings her unique interest in phantasmic histories into play in this extraordinary new work that blends and bends art and real life in the re-invented, inverted space of Dr Strangelove’s post nuclear tomb.” Juliana Engberg, Programme Director European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017.

“Yael Bartana is an artist whose work sits at the vital edge of politics and the imagination. Her capacity to lift us out of our daily lives, while landing us firmly in the big questions of our time, has resonated throughout her work. In What if Women… she achieves one of the most essential feats for an artist today – she helps us rethink the future. MIF is delighted to have collaborated with European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 on this resonant work.” John McGrath, Artistic Director and CEO of Manchester International Festival.

What if Women Ruled the World? is a co-commission between Manchester International Festival and European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017.