The Undertaker (2019)

Yael Bartana’s video work The Undertaker shows an enigmatic leader and her armed followers during a choreographed procession and burial of weapons.

Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, plays a prominent role as this group of dancers, war veterans, and activists moves across the city’s charged historical landscape. The film is a ‘historical pre-enactment’ – a methodology conceived by Bartana – in which she blends facts and fictions to propose speculative futures.

The Undertaker shows the destructive, displacing current of violence that runs through our history and present. Calling to mind military aesthetics and rituals that celebrate war, The Undertaker assumes these militaristic expressions to call for an end to violence. Bartana’s symbolic burial is a monument for the living, an invitation to consider our bodies as both carriers of trauma as well as vehicles for hope and resistance.