Thresholds is about space, moving through a house, a building but also encountering the world through it. It is about passages, tunnels, and about how space gives rise to meanings, particularly from culture to culture, ethnic group to ethnic group, and how communities in motion make home within spaces that are often inhospitable, and often incarcerate or expel them. After all, to speak of space is to speak also of borders.
Louis Chude-Sokei, Thresholds and Echoes: On Migrant Listening

For the German contribution to the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024, the curator Çağla Ilk has invited the artists Michael Akstaller, Yael Bartana, Robert Lippok, Ersan Mondtag, Nicole L’Huillier, and Jan St. Werner to navigate the verge, the gradation, the boundary under the title of Thresholds. Proceeding from alternative readings of history and the future, the contribution extrapolates realms of experience from the liminal.

For the first time, and for the duration of the exhibition, the German Pavilion’s presentation extends beyond the boundaries of the Giardini della Biennale to a further location: the neighboring island La Certosa. Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag present their work in the pavilion building. On La Certosa the idea of the threshold is extended in non- visual contributions by Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, and Jan St. Werner.

With her ongoing work Light to the Nations, Yael Bartana approaches a threshold in time and space: the present reality of planet Earth on the brink of environmental and political destruction. In an act of salvation, a spaceship, envisioned by the artist and named after a passage in the Book of Isaiah, carries multiple generations of humans toward unknown galaxies. It is a grand, open-ended journey, designed for collective healing, drawing on utopian and dystopian elements in equal measure. With this installation, which includes a newly choreographed video work entitled Farewell, Bartana expands her body of work, developed over decades, exploring and reimagining group ceremonies and the social movements that surround them.

Overlaying speculative technologies with Jewish mystical doctrine, the Kabbalah, Bartana utilizes the ship as a vehicle of redemption. Without humans present to destroy it, Earth can recover, and without the restrictions of the land, new forms of societies can be designed on the ship.

While Light to the Nations is based on Jewish traditions, the grand endeavor transcends religious, ethnic, national, state, and tribal boundaries. It offers a future to all humanity, defying the planet’s gravitational pull and the human quest for belonging. By employing her method of pre-enactment, Yael Bartana sets Light to the Nations in the past as well as in the future, thus leaving visitors to the German pavilion in suspense of forgotten hopes.