Art Basel | Yael Bartana / Steffani Jemison / Meiro Koizumi

Yael Bartana’s photographic work "Resurrection" brings together different aesthetic traditions and presents a mutational, multilayered image that alludes to the worlds of Art History and religious mysticism. Holding a living hare and standing quietly with her face half covered, Bartana communicates with the mythical performance piece How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare from 1965, in which Joseph Beuys – his face covered in honey and golden leaf – walked around a gallery holding a dead hare and whispered to its ear explanations of the hanged works, as well as with the performative act by James Lee Byers from 1983 in which he invited Beuys to lay down with him on a gallery floor while his own face was covered in black silk. Visually reinterpreting the two performative interventions while reversing the original settings, “Resurrection" seeks to challenge the devotional and priestly nature of the art world as well as the authoritative and traditionally masculine figure of the artist, evoking a process of empathy, rebirth and transformation.

For the series of black and white photographs The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection (2008), Bartana selected photographs from the extensive archive of legendary photo journalists Leni and Herbert Sonnenfeld, who documented Palestine / Eretz Israel in the years 1933-1948. Adopting that same heroic style, Bartana re-staged the original photographs with the help of young Arabs and Arab Jews, who are currently residing in Israel. Portraying her models as beautiful, joyous, hopeful farmers, workers and soldiers. The series creates an utopian moment that challenges the ethos of the Zionist movement.

Yael Bartana’s work has been shown in numerous leading museums and biennials: Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021, 2018, 2016), Jewish Museum Berlin (2020, 2017), Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, (2017), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2017), The Banff Centre, Alberta (2016), Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2015), Petzel Gallery, New York (2015), Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2015), 31^st Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo (2014), 19^th Biennial of Sydney, Sydney (2013), PAMM, Miami, (2013), Walker Art Center, Pittsburgh (2013), Carnegie International (2013), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2012), Secession Vienna, Vienna (2012), 7th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2012); 54th Venice Biennale, Venice (2011).

Her work is part of the collection of a.o.: van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Kadist, Paris; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

In 2011 Yael Bartana represented Poland on the 54th edition of the Venice Biennial.

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Jemison focuses her research on examples of alternative literacies - expressed through letters, words, and sounds, written in books, or found in archives - practiced by Black Americans from slavery to the present day, exploring the ways in which material language can become abstracted when it exists outside of fixed meanings or can resist being silenced by dominant power structures. 

The signs and drawings depicted in this series of work derives from the unsolved case of Ricky McCormick. McCormick was found in a Missouri field in 1999 with encrypted notes in his pockets. McCormick was thought by his parents to be illiterate and his notes, as well as his murder, remain yet unsolved. Here, Jemison works with an enlarged section of McCormick’s notes and uses artificial intelligence algorithms to speculatively fill missing material in the image, producing a repetitive, layered final picture. 

Specially commissioned for Steffani Jemison's first exhibition space De Appel (Amsterdam), these drawings on clear film stand as a continuation of Jemison’s interest in characters and markings from slave narratives, constructed languages, outsider artists, alternative alphabets, and utopian fiction. The work draws on visionary artist James Hampton, a janitor in Washington, DC, who, prompted by religious visions, spent years during the mid-twentieth century inventing Hamptonese, a private script which remains undeciphered. These works propose opacity as a political strategy and intentional obscurity as a way of re-claiming subjectivity and power. While spare and simple on the surface, each work corresponds to complex personal and social histories in which whole new forms of language were invented as a means of survival.

Steffani Jemison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is part of the collection of a.o.: MOMA (NY, USA); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY, USA); Kadist (Paris, FR); Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY, USA); Studio Museum in Harlem (NY, USA). Recent solo exhibitions and commissioned performances include Annet Gelink Gallery (2020), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019), De Appel (2019), Jeu de Paume (2017), CAPC Bordeaux (2017), MASS MoCA (2017), Nottingham Contemporary (2017), RISD Museum (2015), and the Museum of Modern Art (2015).

Solo screening programs include Lincoln Center: Art of the Real (2018) and Gene Siskel Film Center: Conversations at the Edge (2018). Jemison’s work is included in the Whitney Biennial 2019 as well as in the touring group exhibition Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem (2019-2020). Other collaborative and group exhibitions include the Drawing Center (2014), the Brooklyn Museum (2014), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), among many other venues. In collaboration with Justin Hicks, Jemison performs as Mikrokosmos. Mikrokosmos performances have been presented by Western Front, Nottingham Contemporary, MASS MoCA, festival steirischer herbst, and other venues.

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In the ongoing series of Fog drawings, Meiro Koizumi works with stills from various movies by renowned Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (1903 - 1963).

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the film director, Yasujiro Ozu, was sent to China to fight in the war. According to his diary, at the beginning of the war, he was making plans to make war films once he goes back to his homeland Japan. His diary was filled with ideas of scenes which depict the daily lives of the soldiers in a foreign country. But at some point during the war he stopped making such notes.

As a soldier, he was the unit leader for a unit which spread chemical gas against the Chinese army. He saw and experienced the worst of the war. After Ozu came back to Japan, he never made a single war film nor a single scene involving war battles. All the scars of the war are erased, and repressed under the surface of beautiful daily lives of the people on screen. Meiro Koizumi tries to bring this repressed dimension back to the surface, by the gesture of erasing.

In contemporary Japan, the status of the Emperor remains untouchable and a taboo. In the Air series, Meiro Koizumi depicts the figure of the current Japanese Emperor and questions the way in which he is to be represented, as a ruler or a god. Koizumi creates the Air paintings from existing (news) pictures on which the Emperor is shown. Controversially, he makes the Emperor's figure disappear and he remains invisible on the events in which he was physically present, leaving a ghostly emptiness in its place.

Air in Japanese means 'unwritten rule' or 'atmosphere that keeps one from breaking unwritten rules'.

Meiro Koizumi attended the International Christian University, Tokyo; Chelsea College of Art and Design, London as well as the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Annet Gelink Gallery (2022, 2019 & 2017), Pérez Art Museum Miami (2018), De Hallen, Haarlem (2016), Arts Maebashi, Maebashi (2015), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2014),  Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Centro de Arte de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos (2012), Art Space, Sydney (2011) and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009). He participated in numerous group shows such as the Experimenta's 5th International Biennial of Media Art, Melbourne (2014), 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, Shenzen (2014), Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2014), MSGSU Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul (2013), Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2012), Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011), Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2010), Media City, Seoul (2010), Shanghai MOCA, Shanghai (2008) and many other.

His works are included in a.o. the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York;; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris;  Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Ulsan Museum, South-Korea; M+, Hong Kong; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Queensland Art Gallery.

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