Yael Bartana. Inferno, 2013 (video still); HD video with sound; 18 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist; Petzel, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

This film by the Israeli-born artist was commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where it is currently on view in the Project Gallery. Bartana was among several artists invited to participate in a residency in São Paulo by curators Eyal Danon and Benjamin Seroussi to explore the influx of religious movements in Brazil and their connections to Israel. In this context, Bartana’s work relates to the meteoric rise of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a neo-Pentecostal church movement that started in the 1970s. This extremely profitable church is currently building an oversized replica of the Temple of Solomon, built in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians some four centuries later, according to the Hebrew Bible. A second temple was subsequently built and later destroyed, making the UCKG’s Templo de Salomão the third—and most ostentatious—iteration of this religious site.

Yael Bartana. Inferno, 2013 (video still); HD video with sound; 18 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist; Petzel, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Presented cinematically in large format with surround sound in a dark gallery, Bartana’s film picks up with the christening of such a temple, and the flyovers are revealed to be a first-person view from a trio of helicopters transporting massive religious icons to complete the construction of the temple. Faithful natives of the city cheer on the arrival of these icons and begin to march en masse to the temple, where they earnestly participate in a ritualistic, cult-like ceremony led by a priest-like figure. Bartana’s remarkable ability to conflate notions of time is immediately apparent in these opening scenes. Despite the title screen indicating a setting of 2014, the building of the temple, the mystic performance, the panoramas of skyscrapers, and the natives’ retro-futurist garb all signify different time periods.

In the ceremony within the temple, followers are enraptured by the priest and the massive golden relics, but an ominous feeling pervades the scene, as Bartana focuses on the relics becoming liquefied by flame during a hauntingly narrated rendition of a Hebrew mourning prayer. Suddenly the temple begins imploding, causing masses of people to flee in terror. Bartana here represents the tumult with a melodramatic montage: a stampede of people fleeing, having to traverse dead and wounded bodies on the ground; women emerging from the ruins with children in their arms; and men struggling to save the relics that the helicopters delivered. For much of the chaos, Bartana utilizes overhead shots of the destruction, giving viewers a godlike perspective of the emerging maelstrom. As the dust begins to settle, the priest-like figure casually strides out of the temple, which eventually crumbles to the ground in a scene that evokes summer-blockbuster action films with awe-inspiring CGI effects. The film concludes with a scene of pilgrims praying at the Western Wall—however, it is revealed that this wall is the only remaining ruin of the former temple, which has become a contemporary religious site: Beyond the traditional worshippers stand tourists with cameras and vendors peddling menorah-themed souvenirs and coconuts.

Yael Bartana. Inferno, 2013 (video still); HD video with sound; 18 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist; Petzel, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Illustrating the complex nature of religion in modern times, this final scene emphasizes Bartana’s nimble handling of dichotomies. The temple ruin creates a site that is sacred—as evidenced by the mass of worshippers—but also profane, becoming a tourist site for economic gain. Throughout the film, native followers are dressed in retro-futuristic garments and accessories that allude to both the traditional dress of the region, including crowns of flowers and headdresses of fruit, and a utopian future. The relics are transported to the temple not with typical cargo helicopters, but by sleek, attack-oriented Blackhawk-style aircraft, linking emblems of a modern military-industrial complex with institutional religion. Similarly, Bartana’s cinematic style is a rich amalgamation of techniques, oscillating between narrative and documentary; her use of mise-en-scène within the temple and its ceremony, for instance, clashes with the more objective views of the native people in the beginning and the worshippers and tourists at the end of the film.

In her last major film, And Europe Will be Stunned, Bartana explored the displacement of 3.3 million Jews from their Polish homeland; with Inferno, she contemplates the displacement and transformation of a religious site by inserting the Western Wall into São Paulo. Drawing on the context of the UCKG—an evangelical Protestant church that would bear great expense to build a temple (or mega-church, in today’s terminology) that is closely aligned with Jewish tradition—the artist deftly considers the complicated and perplexing nature of contemporary religious movements and sites.

Yael Bartana’s Inferno is on view in the Project Gallery of the Pérez Art Museum Miami through April 20, 2014.

Bottom floor of the Berlin Biennale, "Occupy Berlin," photo courtesy http://universes-in-universe.org

To transport an Occupy movement to the sanitized dominion of a museum is, as my art historian friends would say, problematic.  This year’s incarnation of the Berlin Biennale (the seventh) has thus far received anemic reviews, with some hinting at real vitriol.  The exhibition is partly as curator Artur Zmijewski envisioned it; full o’ problems.  In interviews Zmijewski offers cryptic monologues about equally cryptic solutions.  I think there are plenty of strategies to be found in the Biennale, but they are buried beneath sprawling and lofty ambitions, making it feel, as Frieze writer Christy Lange writes, like “an awkward slog.”

The impulse to undermine traditional artistic hierarchy by including documentary filmmakers, self-identified social activists and other non-artist-artists is good and worthy and exciting.  And there are moments in the Biennale where ideas ignite and excite viewers to imagine a world with a more porous understanding of art and the things it can accomplish.  The Biennale is awash in beautiful gestures: Lukasz Surowiec transplants trees from Auschwitz-Birkenau,  Yael Bartana stages the first ever international congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, Khaled Jarrar creates postal and passport stamps for the non-existent state of Palestine.

But these gestures are at times overshadowed by an exhibition layout at Kunst Werke that is heavy-handed and foggy.  It’s like it was curated by the gruff classist landlord of a turn-of-the-century New York tenement: the poor students and occupy protestors have the ground floor where they take care of the garden, ride a solar revolution bike and lead wacky seminars about street art and self-sustaining garden communities.  They conduct casting calls for a porn movie, make mandalas out of tobacco shavings and read leftist literature on the ragged arms of a hand-me-down couch.  There are no museum guards there (trust!) and the offices of Kunst-Werke employees are conspicuously ajar (transparency!).  It’s a dirty little utopia in the middle of one of the richest streets in central Berlin, a hypocritical, twingy concession in a district full of wealthy patrons and designer yogurt.

Meanwhile, the “real” artists can be found on the remaining 3 floors.   This architectural caste system is no exaggeration; the participatory element ends with the blackboard paint (which covers the entire ground floor).  Suddenly the walls become the shade of primeval white that we as gallery attendees are accustomed to.

 Marina Naprushkina’s oversized comics hang in the stairwells on the way “up.”

*Sorry, I don’t want to indulge in this super easy metaphor; I’m just really tired (maybe the curators were too?).

Marina Naprushkina with newspapers © Olga Karatch, image courtesy artnet.de

Naprushkina’s pieces are lovely and sincerely concerned with gender inequity and Russian nationalism in Belarus.  She uses graphic works to disseminate information, and last year created a comic newspaper documenting the police brutality that took place against protestors in Belarus in December of 2010.

Naprushkina is one of few object-makers in the Biennale, as the Biennale is focused largely on ephemeral actions and intervention (and the resulting footage of said ephemeral actions and interventions).  Pawel Althamer combines these pursuits with his beautiful if somewhat staid exercise in communal creation; a draw-in called “A Draftsmen’s Congress” at the St. Elisabeth Church.

This Biennale was one of the more anticipated in recent years, in part because it was helmed by controversial Polish artist Artur Zmijewski along with the Russian activist group Voina acting as associate curators.

Zmijewski received quite a bit of attention for his short film Berek, which was pulled from an exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin last year.  Zmijewski includes Berek in the top floor, offering one of the Biennale’s most affecting statements.  In it we see men and women of various ages, naked, engaging in a game of tag inside a former nazi death camp gas chamber.  Their child-like delight at the game borders on manic glee, an emotion belied by damp and ghastly surroundings.  Their nudity, innocent and liberating, forces us to imagine those for whom nudity was neither innocent nor liberating.

Artur Zmijewski "Berek", 1999 (Videostill), Foto: © Artur Zmijewski, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation

Occupying most of the top floor is Berlin-Birkenau, an installation and acccompanying video by Polish artist Lukasz Surowiec.  Surowiec brought 320 Birch trees from the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau to Berlin, planting many of them in front of Kunst-Werke, enlisting the help of local students in his effort.  Surowiec offers Biennale visitors the chance to take a birch sapling with them, along with a certificate of ownership and directions for its care.  He asks that participants report the final location so as to be included in a “living  archive” of repurposed history.  Maybe it’s a bit treacly, but watching German kids plants those trees made me cry.

I wish I had equally touching reactions to the other videos screened at Kunst-Werke, but the majority were installed next to each other in one giant room, with cries from Tahrir Square co-mingling with anti-capitalist chants from European Action Day.  I would have liked to spend more time with each video, but instead I just got annoyed at the buzzing amalgam of multiple videos sonically invading each other.  And I think this might sum up the Biennale; it’s full of great moments, but the noise around it can be deafening.