Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum. If you will it, it is not a dream

"Are we bound forever to remain suspended in the limbo of the endless issues of our identity?" Here, Yael Bartana addresses the spirits of two pioneers, Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl who, in different approaches sought to bring redemption to the individual and to the collective - and whom she declares the spiritual gods of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), which she founded in 2007. The founder of modern psychoanalysis and the visionary of a state for Jews lived just a couple of houses away from each other on Berggasse in Vienna, yet their paths never crossed. Yael Bartana thus brings them together in her installation Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum - a temple of Utopia - to create a moment of collective consciousness and awake the ghost of history to hopefully get some answers. From the beginning of her work as an artist, Bartana has critically questioned the history and self-image of her homeland Israel, sometimes drawing heated reactions with her use of deliberately contradictory material and her charged visual idiom that borrows from political propaganda of all stripes, thus demanding from the spectators to question this language and its continuing allure in a new context. With Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum she is turning to Europe, specifically to Austria, asking if a return to the crime scene will bring us the hoped-for redemption?