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