YAEL BARTANA

Two Minutes of Standstill

Florian Malzacher & Stefanie Wenner (Eds.)

Commonly, the “moment of silence” is one way we memorialize tragedy, how we recognize events that are, simply, beyond words. Two Minutes of Standstill was a performance initiated in Cologne by Israeli video artist Yael Bartana on Yom HaShoah, the holiday commemorating victims and resistance fighters of the Holocaust. For two minutes, Bartana called upon the city to reflect on the meeting of past and present–what it means to be German, to live in Germany as an immigrant and the consequences of the Holocaust and its instrumentalization. This catalog documents the performance and process while inviting historians to discuss collective mourning in Germany today. Bartana, whose work has been shown at Documenta XII, the Venice Biennale and in solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, uses her videos and performances to interrogate notions of homeland, Diaspora and national identity.

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