Artist Talk and Screening: Yael Bartana

Join a screening and discussion with collection artist Yael Bartana whose films, installations, and performances investigate subjects such as national identity, trauma, and displacement. She will be joined by curator and writer Nato Thompson for a conversation moderated by Darsie Alexander, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator, the Jewish Museum. Bartana’s work Farewell (2024) will be featured by Times Square Arts as the Midnight Moment for the month of May.

About the speakers:

Yael Bartana is an observer of the contemporary and a pre-enactor. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination.  Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including solo exhibitions at GL Strand Copenhagen (2024); Jewish Museum Berlin (2021), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2019/2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015) as well as numerous group exhibitions and biennale contributions. Bartana’s work included in major museum collections such as MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Jewish Museum, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Yael Bartana was awarded the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo 2023/24.  

Nato Thompson is a curator, writer, and cultural organizer working at the intersection of art, education, and social change. He is the founder of The Alternative Art School and serves as Artistic Director of Art Market Productions, overseeing art fairs in Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta. He is currently leading the development of LOOM, a new arts and ideas center in New York’s Hudson Valley, and co-curating Future Schools at the National Academy of Design. Previously, Thompson held leadership roles at Creative Time, MASS MoCA, and Philadelphia Contemporary, where he developed major exhibitions, public programs, and civic collaborations. He is the author of Seeing Power, Culture as Weapon, and Living as Form, books that examine the cultural and political agency of art in public life.