Fairytale pictures: Are those fairies and elves at Berlin’s Wannsee?

These are fairytale images that the artist Yael Bartana in the Wannsee Contemporary gallery shows: It seems to be fairies and elves dancing there on the Wannsee shore, defying gravity. The Tagesspiegel newsletter for Steglitz-Zehlendorf reports on this in its current issue.

The Israeli artist, who lives in Tel Aviv and Berlin, has dealt with the location of her new exhibition and refers, among other things, to the work of the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban, who opened his choreographic institute in Grunewald in 1927.

Art expert Shelley Harten writes about Yael Bartana’s new exhibition: “Her photo series shows ghosts of the Laban dancers appearing on the banks of the Wannsee, where they have danced before, repeatedly reworking their movement, blurring into a unity of site-specific memory and thus to become a collective concept.”

The main theme of the exhibition “Rehearsal for Redemption” is the human ability to hope. Yael Bartana has long explored this “prophetic sentiment, based on past experience and a key engine of political imagination”.

A video work, photos and collages that were created in Wannsee will be shown. In her search for hope, however, the artist does not stop at the Wannsee shore, on the contrary: in a collage that rethinks Gustave Doré’s Ascension of Christ, she replaces the Messiah with a spaceship – hope, worship, redemption.

“Rehearsal for Redemption” is on view at Galerie Wannsee Contemporary, Chausseestraße 46, until April 22nd. The gallery is open on Fridays and Saturdays from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment. More at: wannsee-contemporary.com

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