At first glance, the earth spilling out from behind the tall, squared columns of the German pavilion’s facade appears to be a pile of rubble, reminiscent of a war zone or construction site. However, though contrary to this evidence of destruction, the ominous mound of dirt within the pavilion’s fascist architecture is carefully composed, defying an expectation of chaos. The artist and theater director Ersan Mondtag, one of two artists representing Germany at this 60th Venice Biennale, intended the multipart installation, titled Monument eines unbekannten Menschen (Monument of an unknown person), to serve as a memorial to his grandfather Hasan Aygün, who emigrated from Anatolia, Turkey to Germany in 1968. Aygün died of asbestos poisoning in 2017, after working for a German construction company for more than three decades. In a striking act of displacement, Mondtag sourced the soil from Anatolia, a region known for its ancient burial mounds. Because the dirt blocks the pavilion’s front entrance and evokes a scene of destruction, it is easy to assume that Mondtag’s installation is more than a memorial. Given Germany’s complicity in Israel’s assault in Gaza, it initially appears to be a critique of state power. But this perception presumes that the installation commemorates contemporary struggles alongside historical ones.
De-beautifying the pavilion has been a common tactic for artists representing Germany at the Biennale, serving as a way to confront the building’s Nazi past. Two years ago, Maria Eichhorn treated the pavilion like an archeological site, unearthing the architectural points where the building’s original Bavarian design meets the Nazis’ renovations. In 1993, Hans Haacke took a sledgehammer to the pavilion’s marble floor, destroying its austere surface and displaying the shards as if it were a battleground. However, this year, the two artists representing Germany, Mondtag and Yael Bartana, take an entirely different approach to encountering its fascist architecture and Nazi history; they embrace it. By infusing their work with the aesthetic impulses of totalitarianism—grandiosity, theatricality, and Gesamtkunstwerk—while maintaining a subtly ironic tone, both artists establish a perilous dialectic between their artworks, the pavilion’s fascist architecture, and their distinct ethnic identities. Yet Mondtag, a German of Turkish ancestry, and Bartana, an Israeli Jew based in Berlin, fail to account for the catastrophic force of German nationalism in this post–October 7 context. The exhibition conspicuously lacks a relational understanding of memory culture—one that boldly links historical atrocities to contemporary struggles. As a result, their artistic responses feel ambiguous and occasionally irreverent, if not delusional.
Ersan Mondtag, Monument eines unbekannten Menschen, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
In her statement about the exhibition, titled Thresholds, curator Çağla Ilk poses questions that seem to address the current upsurge of nationalism in Germany and globally. Ilk asks: “How can we leave behind the nation-state spatial constructs and ways of thinking?” Yet the literalness of Mondtag’s and Bartana’s responses—the former also exhibiting a theater set of a worker’s dilapidated Berlin apartment and the latter a generation ship for interstellar travel—treats the longing for, in Ilk’s words, the “deterritorialization of the political imagination” more like an absurd public-relations campaign than an invitation for profound questioning. Notwithstanding the lamentable histories they convey, within the context of the German pavilion, both artworks reinforce rather than dissolve the spatial construct of the nation-state.
A smoky haze fills the pavilion’s interior, accentuated by rays of sunlight streaming through the tall, narrow windows set high above the pavilion’s main gallery. The Nazis installed these windows after heightening the pavilion’s ceiling, in renovations that also included adding the marble floor to which Haacke took his hammer. Beneath them, a large, curved screen hugs the interior wall and features Bartana’s single-channel video and sound installation, Farewell (2024). Monumental in scale, projected onto a screen reaching from the floor to the base of the windows, the video alternates between scenes of cultish dancers gesturing toward the night sky and computer-generated images of a massive spaceship floating through a galaxy. Continuing the mound outside and occupying the center of the pavilion, Mondtag’s Monument eines unbekannten Menschen is an imposing triangular, three-story structure with rough, textured walls, with one corner directly pointing at Bartana’s video. The nearly windowless construction is uninviting, even suspicious, like a government building that intentionally hides signs of human activity. Dust emanates from the installation, originating from a substance that Mondtag deliberately spread across the installation’s second floor, replicating the lethal asbestos powder responsible for the deaths of thousands of Turkish workers in Germany. The dust, illuminated by sun rays and intensified by Bartana’s immersive soundscape and imagery, transforms the exhibition into a cruel prank: visitors, entranced by the atmosphere, may soon find themselves struggling to breathe.
Yael Bartana, Farewell, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
When Bartana represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, she showed her trilogy of films titled … And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11), which revolves around the fictional Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) that advocates for three million Jews to return to Poland. Now, thirteen years later, she offers a galactic solution to the “Jewish question” by envisioning a generation ship named Light to the Nations (also the name of the 2022–24 body of work) that will transport Jews to outer space. Bartana’s proposition of Jewish interstellar travel is as absurd and provocative as her establishment of the JRMiP; however, while the former mourns the loss of Jewish life in Poland by calling for a restoration of the Polish Jewish population to its pre-Holocaust numbers, the latter suggests a complete departure from Earth—a chilling notion, especially within the context of the German pavilion. A large sculpture of the spaceship hangs, suspended from the walls and ceiling, near the pavilion’s entrance. Dramatically lit, it is modeled after the Kabbalistic sefirot diagram and features ten glowing spheres connected by intersecting beams. It reappears as a CGI animation in the video Farewell, floating through a galaxy and captured from multiple perspectives, evoking the epic grandeur of a Star Wars scene. The video’s narrative is elusive, but according to the curator’s statement, the strong young dancers anticipate their entry onto the ship through their synchronized movements. Clad in white dresses, they appear in an open field beneath a full moon, their arms raised, ritualistically gesturing toward the night sky. In another scene, the dancers, arranged in a circle, appear in a forest surrounded by twinkling light; they seem transparent, like ghosts, until they gradually vanish completely. Although their actual mounting of the ship is never shown, a sequence of large, all-caps words reads “FAREWELL” in English, Hebrew, German, and Italian.
Bartana’s narrative justification for the Jews’ departure from Earth, as conveyed by the curatorial statement, is the promise of repair—to allow the planet to recover from a human-induced ecological crisis—although the film is unsettlingly couched in Nazi aesthetics. A muscular male figure holding a flaming torch as he runs toward the screen unmistakably references Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), which glorifies idealized Aryan bodies during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The dancer’s choreography includes elements of German Expressionist dance influenced by Rudolf von Laban, who worked under Goebbel’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 to 1936, when he fled Nazi Germany after Goebbels fired him over his choreography for the Olympics. In Bartana’s video, the dancers exhibit no discernible signs of Jewishness; instead, they eerily embody the supposedly flawless and incorruptible Aryan physique. The video’s score, inspired by Richard Wagner—Hitler’s favorite composer and a notorious antisemite—features an operatic rendition of the Hebrew song “Echad, Mi Yodea” (One, who knows one), traditionally sung at the Passover table to evoke the oneness of God. Bartana has previously incorporated references to Nazi propaganda into her work, even creating a self-portrait as Riefenstahl, to explore complex questions of identity and nationalism. In this instance, however, the fusion of fascist aesthetics and Jewish religious themes is reductive, stripping the spiritual potency of Jewish tradition to serve a purely functional agenda of planetary exodus.
Yael Bartana, Farewell, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
Throughout the exhibition, Bartana’s wry reimagining of the messianic mystical vision, in which the “chosen people” ostensibly respond to ecological catastrophe by departing from Earth, parallels an early Zionist fantasy that envisioned the collective resettlement of Jews as a solution to European antisemitism and as an existential threat generally. In an adjacent gallery to the main space, the single-channel video Doreet LeVitte Harten, Interview features the eponymous Harten, an Israeli art historian, candidly discussing the concept of the generation ship—an ark destined for a journey so long that its original passengers would perish en route. She delves into the ethical dilemmas of preparing a generation for such an uncertain voyage and the challenges faced by the intermediate generations confined to this vessel. With her voice conspicuously muted and her Hebrew words translated through English subtitles, Harten elaborates on the spaceship’s relationship to Jewish messianism and the concept of tikkun olam (repairing of the world), arguing that the spaceship is the physical manifestation of the mystic’s intention to rise above this world through the pursuit of justice. If such an intergalactic endeavor promises redemption, it does so in the most basic terms, proposing ecological salvation while conspicuously ignoring the current territorial issues at stake. Though never explicitly stated, this narrative reasoning parallels a strain of early secular Zionism that romanticized biblical narratives to promote the mass relocation of non-agrarian Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine. An initiative aimed at securing safety and building a new society for future generations, it failed to acknowledge the harm inflicted on the non-Jewish Indigenous population already living there.
Just as early Zionists seized upon the Jewish spiritual yearning to return to the Holy Land—a longing central to Jewish religious practice since the Rabbinic period, yet historically never a concrete political intention—Bartana uses the Kabbalistic diagram with a similar irreverence for its deeply mystical powers. On a massive wall in the same gallery as the video with Harten, Bartana has drawn the spaceship’s organizational design with white chalk, co-opting each sphere of the diagram, which traditionally symbolizes the ten attributes of God, or Ein Sof (infinite space), and includes qualities like loving, kindness, humility, understanding, and strength, for bureaucratic purposes. In Bartana’s unholy use of this centuries-old mystical road map for divine consciousness, the godly emanations are replaced by practical functions of collective living, such as recycling, living quarters, public space, and engineering. While it is tempting to interpret this mimicry as ironic, Bartana’s fantastical rationale for planetary exodus explicitly deflects its potential consequences. Would abandoning Earth truly help repair the planet, or is it merely an evasion of responsibility? Worse yet, could intergalactic travel be another form of territorial nationalism?
Ersan Mondtag, Monument eines unbekannten Menschen, 2024 (performance). Copyright Deutscher Pavillon. Photo: Thomas Aurin.
In contrast to Bartana’s installation, which equates departure with redemption, Mondtag’s installation frames farewell as a eulogy. Mondtag’s grandfather, Aygün, born into poverty in rural Turkey, was part of the wave of “guest workers” who migrated to Germany during the economic boom of the 1960s in search of financial security. On the ground floor of Monument eines unbekannten Menschen, a biographical portrait presents the artist’s grandfather as humble, disciplined, and self-sacrificing. This portrait comprises personal artifacts—letters, ID cards, cash, a bank statement, a lottery ticket, a photograph, a poem, and a eulogy—meticulously arranged in vitrines and displayed on the walls. Across from the vitrines, shelves hold the best-selling flowerpots from Eternit, the company where Aygün worked for three decades, which manufactured building materials containing asbestos and ultimately caused severe lung damage and early death among its workers.
Mondtag’s installation resembles a museum diorama gone wrong—an anachronistic attempt to memorialize an overlooked aspect of Germany’s past by recreating the circumstances rather than reflecting on their consequences. Up the spiral staircase, on the second floor, Mondtag has replicated a deteriorating West Berlin apartment, which is caked in the fauve asbestos powder. The space is suffused with signs of death and abandonment: peeling wallpaper, stained mirrors, dishes covered in the off-white powder, prerecorded audio of a baby crying, shards of broken ceramics on the bedroom floor, and an unusable bathtub. A flickering old television, positioned below the room’s dirty curtains, plays a performance by the Munich Symphony Orchestra and Turkish musician Haci Aygün. In a striking moment of synchronization that further heightens the theatrical atmosphere, the scene from Bartana’s Farewell, of the Aryan man holding the flaming torch to Wagneresque music, is visible through the curtains, above the television. As the two soundscapes merge and the replication of Nazi imagery coalesces with the reconstruction of a Turkish guest worker’s Berlin apartment, the spatial construct of postwar Germany—in which the rebuilding of the nation after the extermination of the Jews was outsourced to a migrant workforce—crystallizes.
Yael Bartana, Farewell, 2024. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
As Mondtag memorializes the overlooked injustices endured by Germany’s migrant workforce and Bartana imagines a fantastical solution to ecological collapse, it seems the options for new futures are confined to ambitious infrastructure: a monumental memorial or an exceptionalist spaceship. Engaging with these artworks beyond the conventions of national identity is challenging—not due to a lack of imagination, but because they appear to intentionally sidestep the ongoing violence inflicted by dominant states. If these options, presented within the German pavilion, seem limiting, the exhibition offers audiences an out, beyond the physical boundaries and fraught history of the Giardini, by literally extending the show to the neighboring Venetian island of La Certosa. There, a satellite installation includes ethereal sound works by artists Michael Akstaller, Robert Lippok, Nicole L’Huillier, and Jan St. Werner. Scattered across a small forest, grassy fields, and the ruins of a fifteenth-century monastery, these abstract auditory interventions offer a respite from the relentless turmoil of Mondtag’s and Bartana’s pavilion work. Yet, seemingly absent of content, they offer nothing more than that, and make the German contribution to the Biennale feel even more disconnected from current reality. Amid the escalating state censorship, discrimination, surveillance, and police brutality in Germany—violence that disproportionately affects Palestinians, Muslims, and their allies—the dream of transcending national borders and genuinely deterritorializing our imaginations first requires an unequivocal reckoning with the ongoing horrors of nationalism.
