Two Minutes to Midnight

“What if women ruled the world?” Yael Bartana stages the question in her performative Two Minutes
to Midnight, where an all-women government of a fictitious country must take a stand on an imminent nuclear threat from a foreign nation. A panel of fictional characters and real women experts in fields
such as defence, law, politics and psychology is set in a democratic ‘Peace Room’, mirroring the toxically masculine ‘War Room’ in Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove. The women are tasked with deciding how to approach the pre-scripted situation. Bartana’s visionary work is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary four-year process that analyses the geopolitical power game and presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse.