YAEL BARTANA AND ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI

[1] Banknote from Lodz Ghetto, 1940

[2] Book on the !rst days of the Israel Defense Forces,1948

[3] Still from propaganda movie screened during the March of the Living, Auschwitz, 2009

[4] Proposal for a Jewish renaissance in Poland, 2009

[5] March of the Living, Auschwitz, 2009

[6] Infographic published in the Israeli newspaper detailing an attack on Gaza, 2009

[7] Still from the !lm Escape from Sobibor, 1987

[8] From the book The Nazis by Piotr Uklanski, 1999

[9] Zamenhof Street, Warsaw, before World War II[10] Night show near a Jewish cemetery, Warsaw, 2009

[11] Imprint of Mary Koszmary in sand, 2008

[12] Emblem of Poland presented as a decoration during the celebration of Corpus Christi " a Christian feast day in Warsaw, 2009

[13] O#cial meeting with the construction company from strachowice, poland; planning the !rst kibbutz in warsaw

[14] Concrete barriers exploited by the Israeli army, Hebron, Israel, 2009

[15] Hilal Zaher posing for a reenactment of Herbert Sonnenfeld photographs from the 1930s

YAEL BARTANA AND ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI: AN EXCHANGE PROGRAM

When Yael Bartana was in Warsaw this summer working on her latest film, Artis invited her to conduct an exclusive interview for Programma with her longtime friend and fellow artist-provocateur, Artur Zmijewski. As they developed the project, the idea of a conversation via an exchange of photographs rather than words evolved and is presented on the preceding eight pages.

The selected images represent a small part of our ongoing visual dialogue. We are both possessed by images and obsessed by collecting and creating works that allow us to observe elements of everyday life that are also laden with heavily charged content. Our photographs are visual manifestations of our stored private histories and of our collective memory. They bring our conversation into the public sphere and address narratives of discrimination, hate, exclusion and war. We are often unable to verbally express our feelings, since guilt, anger and fear are quickly revealed. We prefer to talk via images that let us represent our deformed emotions.

These emotions derive from our collective national identities. Sometimes these feelings are not only ours, they are the property of our respective nations: the stereotypes of the Nazi Poles or the timid Jews. Our collection of images poses such questions as what does it mean to be an Israeli Jew? What does it mean to be Polish? We feel manipulated by the narratives we were born into and have unquestioningly absorbed like zombies. We wish to identify these mysterious elements that make us who we are. Each of these images presents a clear ideological statement, yet when juxtaposed with one another they become more ideologically aligned, simplifying the dialogue while at the same time complicating the conversation.Sadly, many of us feel at home with the wars, pogroms and manifestations of hate because they are familiar. Paradoxically, what makes this reality around us so familiar are the elements of fear and insecurity.

¬ Yael Bartana and Artur Zmijewski

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