Yael Bartana

The neon work Patriarchy is History is composed of a simple declaration in present tense, spread on two by two meters and shines in bright blue. Following Bartana’s characterizing practice of “pre-enactments” and political imagination, the neon work confronts the public with a factual statement that belongs to a potential future or an alternative present. Yet at the same time it resonates with an already ongoing, real and not imaginary global movement that promotes and activates the reevaluation of predominant social structures. Doing so, the work acts as a symbolically combative agent in the struggle against the mechanisms that shaped the history of our world. The original neon (Portugese version in a larger scale) was developed in collaboration with a group of female activists from Sao Paolo as a site-specific work for the façade of the Museu de Arte de Saõ Paulo (MASP) in the framework of the group exhibition Historias Feministas: Artistas despois de 2000. This neon, "Patriarchy is History" was first executed for the exhibition "Modest Fashion" at Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam (NL).