And Europe Will Be Stunned

The Return of the Stranger

By Joanna Mytkowska, 2012

When Yael Bartana first came to Poland, the country was embarking upon a national debate about the memory of the Holocaust. The very idea that there was a need to revisit this wartime past was deeply contentious. Jan T Gross's Neighbours (2000), which recounted the story of the inhabitants of the small village of Jedwabne who burnt their Jewish neighbours alive during a pogrom in 1941, forced readers to face the traumatic revelation that Poles were not always the victims or heroes of the resistance; frequently they were witnesses or even collaborators in the crimes of the Holocaust. [1] For the first time since the war, a discussion about guilt — individual and collective — was initiated. Painful and heated, the argument stirred up old demons, awakening suppressed memories that opened up old wounds and began to hammer away at the walls of national denial.

Bartana came to Poland with her experience of struggling with life in Israel, where she objects to the state’s discriminatory policies against Palestinians. She brought an understanding of the consequences of such policies, which lead to inevitable double standards — the differential treatment of those who are ‘one of us’ as opposed to those who are ‘one of them’ — thus undermining the essence of democracy. She had already created Profile (2000), a work in which she showed a young woman performing military drills; Trembling Time (2002), her take on the moment of silence for Independence Day in Israel; as well as Wild Seeds (2005), in which she tried to process the experience of removing settlers from the West Bank. In Poland, she decided to tackle the strained Polish-Jewish relations, nascent antisemitism and the roots of the Israeli state, whose founders were largely of Polish descent. The burden of both the Polish and the Israeli trauma was so great that the verdict of history seemed irreversible. The whole subject matter threatened to be either too monumental or too pompous and, therefore, banal. It seemed to be dead and closed, offering nothing but the potential for compulsive repetition. But illumination came — when Bartana decided to delve into the trauma, to take it on and accept it to a certain degree, believing that in time she would be able to achieve a level of freedom that would enable her to imagine alternative scenarios.

The experience of And Europe Will Be Stunned is reminiscent of the therapeutic process, and, like a dream interpreted, the work gradually reveals layers of latent meaning. The complex narrative evokes conflicting associations, ideas and desires that are not easily resolved; it is a study in exposure, revealing the symptoms of a trauma that has not yet been worked through. The trilogy succeeds in creating the atmosphere of an oppressive nightmare through constant reference to familiar matters narrated through a discredited propagandist language which is subversively twisted and distorted.

Read the rest.

Read other essays:

History is a Nightmare by Jacqueline Rose

Answering a Call by Boris Groys

This is Not a Call to the Dead by Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophi

Image: installation shot of And Europe Will Be Stunned at Hornsey Town Hall, photograph: Marcus Leith.