Together with Vita Kuben, we invite you to a video installation by artist Yael Bartana, born in Israel and based in Berlin and Amsterdam. She has exhibited at several major museums and received numerous prestigious awards. She represented the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and won the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo 2023/24. In her films, installations, photographs, staged performances, and public monuments, Yael Bartana explores themes such as national identity, trauma, and displacement—often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals, and collective gatherings.
Commissioned by the Brazilian Jewish art space Casa do Povo, Bartana’s new work brings together two groups from different diasporas: Coral Tradição, a Jewish-Brazilian choir born out of the now-destroyed Yiddishland (a nation defined by the reach of the language itself), and Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street performance group rooted in Canse-Bra music. In Bartana’s practice—which often involves weaving new possible alliances—her video can be seen as an opportunity to imagine the emergence of collective bodies beyond fixed identity labels.
The work was recorded at Teatro de Arte Israelita Brasileiro (TAIB), built in the basement of Casa do Povo in 1960. TAIB was created for a future that never fully materialized: the revival of Yiddish. Yet, the theater became a space for São Paulo’s experimental performing arts scene in the 1960s and 70s, before falling into the crisis in which it still remains today. It is among the ruins of this legendary theater that Bartana imagines a future—between past and present, memory and future, the sung word and collective choreographies.
In diasporic communities, music can serve as a powerful tool for the collective preservation of memory. In unison with storytelling, traditional languages, and dances, songs can represent a living home for stateless nations.
Norrlandsoperan
Opening: November 25 (time to be announced)
November 25 – December 21, 2025
The video installation runs 10 minutes and will be shown on loop.
Free admission
