• Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present If You Will It, It Is Not a Dream, a solo exhibition by Yael Bartana (*1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel; lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin). The exhibition has been realized in collaboration with Irit Sommer (Sommer Contemporary Art), who has represented the artist for more than twenty-five years. 

    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.

     
  • For more than two decades, Bartana has worked through pre-enactment, staging speculative futures as if they had already occurred. She...

    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.

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  • 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—distils 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.

     
  • Yael Bartana, UTOPIA NOW!, 2024 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, If you will it, it is not a dream, 2012 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Trembling Times, 2017 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, HOMESICK, 2025 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Eretz (Land), 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Redemption Now, 2021 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, UTOPIA NOW!, 2024
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    • Yael Bartana, Zukunftsbewältigung II+III (Overcoming the Future II+III), 2023
      Yael Bartana, Zukunftsbewältigung II+III (Overcoming the Future II+III), 2023
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    • Yael Bartana, Light to the Nations – Generation Ship, 2023
      Yael Bartana, Light to the Nations – Generation Ship, 2023
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  • Yael Bartana, Heroes, 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Resurrection I, 2020 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Ascending, 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Zukunftsbewältigung I (Overcoming the Future I), 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yael Bartana, Heroes, 2023
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  • Yael Bartana examines the structures of power and the collective imagination that shape contemporary society. Through her films, installations, photographs,...
    Photo credits: Wolfgang Stahr

    Yael Bartana 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 national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She was awarded the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo for 2023/24.