Ben Hagari

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What is my work about?

My videos and installations are tragic comedies that unfold in absurdist environments. Frequently, a protagonist performs quotidian actions within a highly constructed situation that implicitly raise larger questions about identity and territory. My work dissolves the distinction between theatrical facade and backstage by opening onto spaces where magic, subterfuge, and poetry collide. My films have developed out of cross-disciplinary collaborations with musicians, shadow puppeteers, polygraph technicians, make-up artists, and chefs. They playfully consider how a given skill-set might operate outside of its ordinary context and application. Here, filmmaking functions as a utopian space where conventional language fails and hypothetical situations lead to unexpected results.

 

Artist Statement

My videos and installations are tragic comedies that unfold in absurdist environments. Frequently, a protagonist performs quotidian actions within a highly constructed situation that implicitly raise larger questions about identity and territory. Environment and inhabitant are mutually constitutive; domesticity functions both as a prison and as a refuge. My work dissolves the distinction between theatrical façade and backstage by opening onto spaces where magic, subterfuge, and poetry collide. A defamiliarization effect is created through conceptual and material mimesis: make-up, props and set are manipulated to create an artificial, yet internally consistent, system of representation. These idiosyncratic worlds are formed through mimicry and repetition, much like a child learning to speak.

The film Fresh (2014) introduces a hypothetical situation wherein a man, covered entirely in vegetables yet still recognizable as human, resides in a greenhouse—the quintessential hybrid of nature and culture. He interacts with insects, machines, and other humans in encounters that border on the absurd: a polygraph tests his emotional responses to images of plant life; a chef harvests vegetables from his body that are subsequently carved into fully functional musical instruments. Here, a quasi-nature documentary transforms into an experimental concert and animal, vegetable, and mineral interact and overlap in surprising ways.

An earlier project created in 35 mm film entitled Invert (2011) portrays a day in an inverted world where the inanimate and the human rely on logic of complementary colors and an inversion of light and shadow. The result seen on film—on the celluloid—is a “positive” image, with unexpected distortions resulting from the manual inversion process. Invert, the figure of the artist in color reversal, moves around with eyes shut, ears blocked, and nostrils plugged. He attempts to teach his silent parrot to speak. The words, names of the objects appearing in the film, are said in Hebrew, spoken backwards. The film formulates presence and absence, the illuminated and the dark, the chattering and the silent.

My films have developed out of cross-disciplinary collaborations with musicians, shadow puppeteers, polygraph technicians, make-up artists, and chefs. As a result, they playfully consider how a given skillset might operate outside of its ordinary context and application. Here, filmmaking functions as a utopian space where conventional language fails and hypothetical situations lead to unexpected results.

 

CV

Education

2014

MFA, School of the Arts, Columbia University, NY

2008

BFA, Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel

 

One-Person Exhibitions

2011

Invert, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv

A Nous La Liberté, Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel

2009

Weather House, New Positions, Art Cologne, Germany

2007

Cuckoo, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv

 

Selected Group Exhibitions and Screenings

2014

New in the Collection, The Israel Museum Jerusalem

Columbia University 2014 MFA Thesis, Fisher Landau Center For Art, Long Island City, NY

Locomotion 2014, Artists’ Moving Image Festival, London

2013

No Place, BAAD Gallery Bezalel Academy, Tel Aviv

Matinée, Lesley Heller Workspace, NY

And After a Pause, it Continued, Columbia University, NY

2012

Artists’ Film International, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Ballroom Marfa, TX; ParaSite, Hong Kong; GAMeC, Bergamo; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; City Gallery Wellington, Wellington; Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aries

Afterwards, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea

The Bronner Residence, KIT Düsseldorf

Layla Tov, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Prizes in Art from the Ministry of Culture, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel

2011

The Vault, Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, OH

The Museum Presents Itself, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv

2010

Video Zone 5, International Video Art Biennial, CCA Tel Aviv

2009

Can’t You See I’m Walking on Air, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv

14th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Skopje, Macedonia

2008

The Tyranny of the Transparent, Minshar Gallery, Tel Aviv

Five Young Artists, Artists’ Studios Gallery, Tel Aviv

2007

The Rear, The 1st Herzlyia Biennial of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel

2006

Present Now, Omanut Haaretz Festival, Tel Aviv

Half Board, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv

Intersection, 23rd Jerusalem Film Festival video art Program, Israel

2005

From the Heart, The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

 

Residency

2013

Institute of Investigate Living, Workshop with Andrea Zittel and James Trainor, Joshua Tree, CA

2009

Bronner Residency, Goethe Institut and Kunststiftung NRW, Dusseldorf, Germany

 

Grants and Awards

2014

The David Berg Foundation Fellowship, NY

2013

Artis Fellowship, Columbia University, NY

2012

RölfsPartner Award, Dusseldorf

2011

The Young Artist Prize 2010, Israel Ministry of Culture

2009

The Fund for Video-Art, CCA, Tel Aviv

2008

America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award

Raffi Lavie Award for a Young Artist, Hamidrasha School of Art

2007

Study Fellowship, Israel Ministry of Education

 

Publications

This Film Is About You, visual essay, Hamidrasha Annual Journal of Art, Fall 2013

Shadow of a Doubt, Interventions Journal, Columbia University NY, July 2013

Invert, artist book, bilingual edition in Heb and Eng, Text by Doron Rabina, 2011

Artist in Residence, Programma Art Magazine, Sept. 2009

 

Reviews

Amarel Wenkert, A Serious Man, interview, Arts Culture, Beat blog, Dec. 2013

Rubik Rosenthal, Reverse Language, Maariv, Nov. 2011

Smadar Sheffi, A Journey with Ben Hagari’s Art, Haaretz, Mar. 2011

Ellie Armon Azoulay, Luminous Film, interview, Haaretz, Feb. 2011

Roee Rosen, The Boy Who Cried Cuckoo, Hamidrasha, Annual Journal of Art, 2008

Galia Yahav, Cuckoo All Over The Head, Time Out Tel Aviv, Oct. 2008

 

Teaching

2009-12 Head of the Video Department, Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel

 

Invert, 5 minutes excerpt, 2011, 35 mm film, 11 min

 Fresh, 4 minutes excerpt, 2014, HD video, 16 minutes

 

A Nous La Liberté (Freedom for Us), video documentation, 2012, 1:25 minutes