Galerie Peter Kilchmann is delighted to present the solo exhibition If you will it, it is not a dream by Yael Bartana (b.1970 Kfar Yehezkel, Israel; lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin). This solo presentation was realized in collaboration with Irit Sommer (Sommer ContemporaryArt), who has represented the artist for a bit more than twenty-five years.

Several neon works punctuate this exhibition, drawing on titles and lines from across Yael Bartana's practice. Turned into light, these phrases make the show's concerns immediately present, allowing meanings to shift as works from different projects share the same space. One of them, If you will it, it is not a dream—which also gives the exhibition its title—distills an earlier project in which Bartana brought together the spirits of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, two thinkers who strove, in different ways, to bring about individual and collective redemption.

For more than two decades, Bartana has worked through pre-enactment, staging speculative futures as if they had already occurred. She scripts future possibilities by bringing historical ideological aesthetics into imagined events—a documentary procedure entangled with prophecy. Pre-enactment dismantles the myths of nationality and salvation, registering what remains when those fantasies are displaced across time and scale. It is a call for collective imagination to question the present by creating alternative realities and speculative futures.

In If you will it, it is not a dream, the will to shape the world and the dream that resists control appear as two sides of the same impulse. The exhibition brings together works from across Bartana’s practice: sculpture, photography, film, and neon, including pieces from Light to the nations, her contribution to the German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. These works move between prophecy and disillusion, salvation and exhaustion, the utopian and the dystopian.