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.
Presented as part of a recent group of works titled The Paradox of Healing, Rhombus for Healing No...
Open Call for AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints March 12, 2021 ArtsEquator and Goethe-Institut Singapore are pleased to announce the launch of the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022 ...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
Ventana indiscreta (Rear Window) by Karen Lamassonne takes its title from Hitchcock’s renowned 1954 classic...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
In New Mexico, Camacho investigated the reasons why the inhabitants of a village decided to change its name Truth or Consequences in the 50’s; with Group Marriage, an on-going project as part of the Amsterdam Spinoza Manifestation (2009), he petitions the Dutch parliament to open civil marriage to groups of citizens who would marry each other...
Binelde Hyrcan’s video “Cambeck” is a playful study of four boys on a beach in Angola playing in a chauffeured car made of sand...
Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia...
In “Untitled II (Mapping text)”, 2009, Langa abstracts language in an attempt to change the familiar into the absurd...
A Jacob Lawrence Expert on a Profile of Him from ARTnews’s Archives – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 24, 2020 1:35pm George Chinsee Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was one of the deftest documentarians of African-American life in the United States, and over the next few years, people across the country will get a chance to see one of his greatest series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), united in full for the first time...