Annet Gelink Gallert is happy to announce the screening of Yael Bartana's film Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) in The Bakery.
In her work, Yael Bartana investigates image creation and cultural identity, addressing themes of trauma, displacement, and national identity.
Her work Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) was initially released as an experimental theatre performance with the emblematic title What if Women Ruled the World?. The film was then composed using the filmed material from three of these performances, in Philadelphia (US), Aarhus (DK) and the Volksbühne in Berlin (DE). In the film, an all-female government discusses unilateral disarmament. While peace and disarmament are the main tenets for this government, a hostile country is expanding its nuclear stockpiles, led by self-absorbed President Twittler. During the discussion, a group of actual specialists, including defence advisers, soldiers, lawyers, peace activists, humanitarians, and politicians, join the government, which is made up of actors. Although the setting is a copy of Stanley Kubrick's so-called War Room from Dr Strangelove (1964), the film's content is its opposite: In Bartana's Peace Room, it is women who lead the discussion and food is served by men with bared torsos. As the government and experts exchange ideas about war, security and inequality, tensions escalate with the enemy nation. The work is the final part of Bartana's transdisciplinary series, similarly titled What if Women Ruled the World?
At a time when international crises coexist with dominant male leaders, a nuclear arms race is still part of geopolitical conflicts, and women come out for the violence inflicted on them by (authoritarian) men, Bartana presents a speculative work in which women rule the world and interdisciplinary cooperation and disarmament are at the centre.
Together with De Balie, Annet Gelink Gallery organizes a screening of the film and an artist talk with Yael Bartana and two experts in (one of) the themes from the film. The event takes place on January 21.