10 SEP until 14 SEP 2025
Daily from 11 am – 6 pm

Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce a screening of Yael Bartana’s latest video work Mir Zaynen Do!, on view from 10 to 14 September, coinciding with Berlin Art Week.

In communities of the diaspora, music can be a powerful tool for collectively preserving memories. Along with storytelling, traditional languages, and dancing, songs can represent a living home for stateless nations.

Commissioned by the Jewish Brazilian art space Casa do Povo, Yael Bartana’s video Mir Zaynen Do! (2024) brings together two groups from two different diasporas: Coral Tradição, a Jewish Brazilian choir born from the now-destroyed Yiddishland (a nation whose borders were defined by the reach of the Yiddish language itself), and Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street music ensemble that stems from Candomblé culture. In an exercise of weaving new possible alliances, Bartana’s video is an invitation to imagine the emergence of collective bodies beyond fixed identity labels.

The work was shot in the Teatro de Arte lsraelita Brasileiro (TAIB), which was built in the basement of the Casa do Povo in 1960. The TAIB was created for a future that never fully happened: the return of the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, it became the dream theater of the experimental performing arts scene in São Paulo in the 1960s and ’70s. It is in the ruins of this legendary theater that Bartana imagines a time to come – between past and present, memory and pre-enactment, the sung word and collective choreographies.

Yael Bartana employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. In her films, installations, photographs, performances and public monuments the artist investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.

Bartana co-represented Germany alongside theater director Ersan Mondtag at the Venice Biennale 2024. In 2025 the artist will present a solo exhibition at the North Norwegian Art Center, Lofoten, Norway. Further recent solo exhibitions took place at Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; Gammel Strand, Copenhagen; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Center for Digital Art, Holon; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Jewish Museum Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.

Her works are part of various permanent collections, such as Jewish Museum, Berlin, Tate Modern, London; Jewish Museum, New York; Guggenheim, New York and Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.

Bartana was awarded the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo 2023/24.

11 SEP until 18 OCT 2025
Opening – 11 SEP 2025, 6-10 pm

Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce It Used to Be, Ross Bleckner’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The title of the exhibition implies a contemplation of things past and transitory states – what lingers at the threshold between form and void, presence and absence, of what used to be. It primes us for an experience that is at once elegiac and reflective, exemplary of the artist’s delicate approach to painting and the construction of images.

Bleckner often treats organic forms with an optical softness, blurring their edges until they seem to hover in light. These motifs appear as distilled essences, rather than literal studies. Plants in his work often dissolve into luminous bodies or patterned repetitions, their physical specificity replaced by an atmospheric presence. Rain, when it emerges, tends to take on the form of vertical drips, scattered droplets, or hazy veils of paint. Georgia O’Keeffe famously insisted that her floral paintings were about the flower itself, not encoded symbolism, despite widespread interpretation. Bleckner, similarly, abstracts floral forms until they become apparitions – vehicles for memory, loss, and light. He layers paint, erases, and builds surfaces that retain the ghost of form yet evoke something spectral, symbolic, and deeply emotional.

Over time, Bleckner’s visual language has evolved, while remaining committed to the exploration of human vulnerability and transformation. His more recent works continue to use abstract forms and ethereal light effects to convey a sense of otherworldliness through reduced composition, where a single body hovers on a monochrome background, as in his recent Sunset paintings. In the exhibition, we encounter an array of canvases, both monumental and intimate in terms of format. This dense display of images can be seen as a cross-section of Bleckner’s practice, which treats the canvas almost like a space for meditation, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves in luminous fields and reflective surfaces. Here abstraction is used to intensify emotional experience, and viewers are drawn into Bleckner’s compositions, which shimmer and dissolve, much like experience itself.

Ross Bleckner emerged in the 1980s New York art scene, gaining recognition for his distinctive canvases that often incorporate repetition, blurring, and subtle layering of light and shadow. His work functions as poetic visual mourning, commemorating fleeting moments, fragility and impermanence. To this day, he is the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, at the age of 45. The artist’s recent exhibitions include the Neues Museum Nürnberg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; L.A. County Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Luzern; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.