Yael Bartana: If you will it, it is not a dream

Are we bound forever to remain suspended in the limbo of the endless issues of our identity?" This is one of the questions put to Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud during the performance accompanying the opening of Yael Bartana's exhibition Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum (If you will it, it is not a dream).

Here, Yael Bartana addresses the spirits of two pioneers, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl who, in different approaches sought to bring redemption to the individual and to the collective – and whom she declares the spiritual gods of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), which she founded in 2007. The founder of modern psychoanalysis and the visionary of a state for Jews lived just a couple of houses away from each other on Berggasse in Vienna, yet their paths never crossed. Yael Bartana thus brings them together in her installation Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum – a temple of Utopia – to create a moment of collective consciousness and awake the ghost of history to hopefully get some answers.