YAEL BARTANA. TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

ΕΜΣΤ Screening Room-Mezzanine

08.03 – 27.10.2024

ΕΜΣΤ  presents Two Minutes to Midnight (2021), a video based on the two-hour long 2017 performance by Bartana entitled What if Women Ruled the World? In a room that resembles the film set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), a possible nuclear threat scenario unfolds. Contrary to the film, the council of the threatened country consists only of women. Specialists, in fields like defence, peaceful activism, philanthropy and politics, investigate ways to de-escalate international crises, contemplate whether it is better to die for an act of peace than survive a pre-emptive killing, and analyse the macho aspects of war, belligerence and territorial behaviour. In this deeply anti-war work, Bartana treats serious issues with humour but also highlights practical ways of dealing with global threats in an alternative to the dominant patriarchal power system. The title of the work refers to the Doomsday clock, a clock devised by scientists as a metaphoric reference to our proximity to the world’s end. When Yael Bartana realised the work, the doomsday clock was just two minutes before midnight. Today, the clock has moved forward to predict that we are now just 90 seconds before the end of the world.