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. Bartana’s visionary work presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse.