Yael Bartana opens her latest show at Petzel Gallery in Manhattan with “Inferno,” a provocative, cinematic epic set in Brazil. The somewhat excessive Temple of Solomon in São Paulo is her protagonist, built as an exact replica of its ancient namesake by the evangelical Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the summer of 2014 to the tune of $300million. Inferno shows a utopian band of followers, bedecked with fruit and flowers, emerging from the city and flocking to the newly constructed building as helicopters delivering sacred relics of the Jewish faith fly overhead. 

Knowing she wouldn’t have access to the real temple as it was still under construction during the production of the film, Bartana used a mix of São Paulo locations, a large set build based on her in-depth research of the projected finished building in the warehouse of a Samba school and CGI to create the visually lush sequences. The full-length film takes on a far darker tone in the scenes following this excerpt: the imagined destruction of the temple and the subsequent worship and tourist-ification of its remains, something Bartana describes as a “historical pre-enactment.”

Bartana, who has had video works exhibited at New York’s MoMA PS1 and the Venice Biennale, cast the central character after a chance glimpse during Gay Pride in São Paulo. “Carlos Marcio José da Silva aka Marcia Pantera is a very famous drag queen in Brazil,” she says. “I think the fact that I worked with a gay man annoyed the church more than the imagined destruction of their new building!”

Rebecca Guinness is Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.