Petzel is pleased to announce the inclusion of Yael Bartana’s multi-channel film Malka Germania (2021) in this year’s Art Basel Unlimited. The film will be presented with Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Galleria Raffealla Cortese, Milan; Petzel, New York, and Sommer Contemporary At, Tel Aviv & Zurich.

Malka Germania investigates the longing for collective redemption as a response to an age of anxiety. An androgynus messianic figure, named Malka Germania, arrives in Berlin to bring about a series of changes in the city: an alternative reality.

Malka Germania is Hebrew for ‘Queen Germania.’ The imaginative name makes reference to an unusual female designation for the Messiah: ‘Malka Meshichah’ or the ‘Annointed Queen.’ The Messiah has come to Berlin and thus to the historic epicenter of Jewish, Israeli, and German collective memory. Instead of immediate redemption the city remains haunted by its residents’ collective subconscious: their dreams, fears, and memories.

The film portrays the ambiguities of contemporary German- Jewish experience, disrupting fixed iconographies and deconstructing identities – the past and future implode into an alternative present.

Yael Bartana (b. 1970, Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) makes work that explores the imagery of identity and the politics of memory through films, installations, and photographs. She employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine, crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. Bartana lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.