Yael Bartana: Farewell

Cecilia Hillström Gallery is proud to present Farewell, Yael Bartana’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show centers around her project for the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale and expands upon it with new works.An artist talk will take place in the exhibition on Saturday 17 May at 15:00, moderated by Nanna Hjortenberg, Director of Gammel Strand. Please RSVP to rsvp@chgallery.se if you wish to attend.

The exhibition takes its title from the video work Farewell, which portrays a ceremonial departure for the generation ship Light to the Nations, destined for distant galaxies. The ship’s launch marks a radical decision to separate from Earth – a departure from a planet exhausted by human failure–towards an unknown future crucial for humanity’s survival. Farewell is a moment of collective grief and anticipation.

The dancers at the heart of Farewell are dressed in white garments that echo 20th-century fascist aesthetics – purity, grace, and unity. Bartana draws from this authoritarian visual language – not to celebrate it, but to expose its seductive power. Alongside movement inspired by Rudolf von Laban’s early 20th-century expressionist dance, the choreography hovers between collective ritual and ecstatic release. These references lend Farewell a haunting ambivalence: it is both a warning and a promise, emphasizing the thin line between utopia and dystopia.

As the video unfolds, Bartana carries viewers beyond the confines of Earth to the vast expanse of space, where the generation ship, Light to the Nations, floats in the cosmic void. The ship is a messianic vessel, and thus a promise of redemption. Towards the ceremony’s climax, the dancers don animal masks – a horse, a donkey, and a ram-evoking apocalyptic imagery and connecting to the Judeo-Christian messianic narrative woven throughout Bartana’s work. Farewell’s ecstatic dance pre-enacts both catastrophe and hope. The forest setting reflects Light to the Nations’ imperative to grant nature a chance for rejuvenation.

A model of the generation ship Light to the Nations is on view in the exhibition, alongside a VR experience that allows visitors to glimpse life aboard the vessel. Designed by Bartana using the framework of Jewish mysticism, the ship’s structure is based on the Kabbalistic diagram of the Sephirot. Each of its ten interconnected spheres – dedicated to functions like agriculture, public space, heritage, bridge and recycling – translates a spiritual principle into the speculative architecture. The ship is a vessel of messianic hope, a utopian ark suspended in space. Its imagined technology is shaped by mystical cosmology. As such, Farewell envisions a departure towards realities yet unknown to humankind–a call for a new beginning which entails the end of an era.