Yael Bartana

The video work Malka Germania, commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin, investigates the longing for collective redemption as a response to an age of anxiety. An androgynous messianic figure, Malka Germania, arrives in Berlin and brings about a series of changes in the city: the past and future implode into an alternative present. Malka Germania is Hebrew for “Queen Germany.” The name makes reference to an unusual female designation for the Messiah: Malka Meshichah, or the “Annointed Queen.” The Messiah has come to Berlin and thus to the historic epicenter of Jewish, Israeli, and German collective memory. Instead of experiencing immediate redemption, as the exhibition’s title might imply, the city is haunted by its residents’ collective subconscious: their dreams, fears, and memories. The piece portrays subconscious elements, gray areas, and ambiguities of contemporary German- Jewish experience through the artistic medium. At the same time, it attempts to disrupt a fixed iconography and to deconstruct identities. Bartana leaves the question of who is to be redeemed ambiguous. Perhaps it is people trying to shake off the Nazi past? Or others who want to move on from the trauma of the Holocaust? Or does she mean all humankind as the beneficiaries of a messianic age? The commissioned work shows how impossible it is to break away from personal or inherited pasts. At the same time, it preserves the tension of redemption, which is a core element of national myths and collective identities. Beyond the video installation itself, Bartana adds another layer of public engagement with savior figures. A vitrine cabinet recessed in the video wall reveals a collection of statuettes of Malka Germania with an eagle. Resembling a museum storage facility, this display raises the prospect of Malka being historicized and commercialized as a cultural icon. The association between the savior figure and the national symbol combines religious expectations with political ones. The liberation of the eagle by the Messiah, as depicted on the exhibition poster, stands allegorically for the moment of redemption. Malka Germania, Hebrew for ''Queen Germany'', is a three-channel video installation which features an androgynous female messiah. In this work, the hard distinction between such oppositions as past/present, trauma/utopia, villain/victim, amnesia/memory, and precarity/stability loses its credibility. Again, Bartana proves her uncannily sharp eye for the future, by creating a work evoking the ''End Days'' over the course of 2020, when a pandemic, controversial US-presidential elections and Black Lives Matter protests converged. Today, the work will unquestionably evoke images of the Ukraine war, and as global politics finds itself in a conflict between democracy and autocracy, the figure of the messiah rising to defy totalitarianism will likely resonate.