17 min
Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ». The video is an attempt at capturing this decisive moment when the child lets go of its wilderness to become « civilized », and raises the nature/culture dichotomy, dear to the Enlightenment philosophers.
In his films, Guy Ben-Ner plays with the history of cinema, referring to the experimental origins of silent film, to comic figures such as Keaton and Chaplin, and to Truffaut’s French New Wave. Since 1996, the artist has been concentrating on his family members and stages them with burlesque humor. Just as Buster Keaton, he is at once actor-director, his wife and children the only other actors, and his apartment the improvised set: he uses available furniture and objects, creates an artificial island in his kitchen and constructs a tree house for Treehouse Kit (2005), a work in which the sculpture takes part in the video installation. The theatrical aspect of the set relates to the playful situations. Each one of Ben-Ner’s films participates, as an episode, to a collection of fables about human nature, reenacting stereotypical motifs found in literature and cinema, such as the desert island (“Berkeleys Island” 1999) or “Moby Dick” (2000). Guy Ben-Ner was born in 1969, Ramat Gan, Israel. He lives and works in Tel Aviv.
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...
In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...
For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
Hernan Bas’s recent works, particularly his series “The Conceptualists,” showcase his continued exploration into the realms of queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
Bad innovation in the name of protection is not a ready-made, but was made entirely by the artist, representing a stroller...
In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016...