If you will it, it is not a dreamYael Bartana: Rämistrasse 33, ZurichOpening: Friday, Nov 21, 6-8 pm
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, in collaboration with Sommer Contemporary Art, is glad to present Yael Bartana's first solo exhibition at its Rämistrasse 33 premises.
Opening: Friday, Nov 21, 6–8 pm.
Several neon works punctuate this exhibition, drawing on titles and lines from across Yael Bartana's practice. Turned into light, these phrases make the show's concerns immediately present, allowing meanings to shift as works from different projects share the same space. One of them, If You Will It, It Is Not a Dream—which also gives the exhibition its title—distills an earlier project in which Bartana brought together the spirits of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, two thinkers who strove, in different ways, to bring about individual and collective redemption.
For more than two decades, Bartana has worked through pre-enactment, staging speculative futures as if they had already occurred. She scripts future possibilities by bringing historical ideological aesthetics into imagined events—a documentary procedure entangled with prophecy. Pre-enactment dismantles the myths of nationality and salvation, registering what remains when those fantasies are displaced across time and scale. It is a call for collective imagination to question the present by creating alternative realities and speculative futures.
In If You Will It, It Is Not a Dream, the will to shape the world and the dream that resists control appear as two sides of the same impulse. The exhibition brings together works from across Bartana’s practice: sculpture, photography, film, and neon, including pieces from Light to the Nations, her contribution to the German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. These works move between prophecy and disillusion, salvation and exhaustion, the utopian and the dystopian.
Yael Bartana (b. 1970) examines the structures of power and the collective imagination that shape contemporary society. Through her films, installations, photographs, performances, and public monuments, she explores issues of national identity, collective memory, and displacement—often through the lens of rituals, commemorations, and social narratives.
Her work has been shown in major institutions such as GL Strand, Copenhagen (2024); the Jewish Museum Berlin (2021); Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2019/2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Secession, Vienna (2012); and MoMA PS1, New York (2008). She has participated in the Venice Biennale (2024, 2011), the São Paulo Biennial (2014, 2010, 2006), and Documenta 12 (2007).
Bartana received the Artes Mundi 4 Prize (2010), and her trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned was named by The Guardian among the most significant artworks of the 21st century. Her works are held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She was awarded the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo for 2023/24 and lives between Berlin and Amsterdam.
