Dear Reader,

Below is the edited transcript of a series of conversations between Yael Bartana and the curators Galit Eilat and Charles Esche. The conversations took place over several days in Eindhoven/NL at the time of Yael Bartana’s participation in Play Van Abbe/Strange and Close at the Van Abbemuseum. The transcript begins in the middle of a meditation on the impact of Israeli—and other—societies on the individual imagination, and the necessity of finding a position outside one’s home in order to reflect upon it.

When Yael Bartana called into existence the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, she automatically lost absolute control over it. Everyone who feels called out to the blackboard by her work can, and actually should, put in their two pennyworth about how they imagine the movement’s role, so let me make a few remarks myself.

In Yael Bartana’s Polish video trilogy, aside from the politically symbolic aspects it contains, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) that she had initiated, announces its manifesto on a new experimental societal form.

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk around the world till we come back to the same place”.
G. K Chesterton

We want to return! Not to Uganda, not to Argentina or to Madagascar, not even to Palestine. It is Poland that we long for, the land of our fathers and forefathers. In real-life and in our dreams we continue to have Poland on our minds.