The starting point of 'Inferno' is the construction of the third Temple of Solomon (Templo de Salmão) in São Paulo by a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. Built to biblical specifications, this new temple is a replica of the second temple in Jerusalem, the violent destruction of which signaled the diaspora of the Jewish people in the 6th century BCE. 'Inferno' confronts this conflation of place, history, and belief, providing insight into the complex realities of Latin America that have given rise to the temple project. Bartana’s film employs what she refers to as “historical pre enactment,” a methodology that commingles fact and fiction, prophesy and history. Her work addresses the grandiose temple project through a vision of its future: Does its construction necessarily foreshadow its destruction? Using a powerful cinematic language, 'Inferno' collapses histories of antiquity in the Middle East with a surreal present unfolding halfway around the world.

From her earliest videos ("Profile", 2000; "Trembling Time", 2001) to such recent pieces as "True Finn" (2014), and including the monumental trilogy "And Europe Will Be Stunned" (2007–2011), with which she represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale, Bartana’s work betrays a fascination with ceremonies and social rituals, and with the role of the latter in the shaping of communities and individuals. Yet these works are at a far remove from any direct documentary mode; modelled on the aesthetics of ritual, they are above all performative creations the audience is won over by without realising it. Her films point up the fact that cinema is itself a ritual and that the camera, perhaps better than anything else, imitates ritual in its capacity to fetishise, to seduce and to draw us into the ceremony we are witnessing.