Gilad Ratman has been selected to present The Workshop (2013), a multi-channel site-specific installation at the Israeli Pavilion at this year’s 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Open 1 June–24 November 2013. Commissioned by the Israel Ministry for Culture and Sport, Ratman is the youngest artist ever to be chosen for the Israeli Pavilion.
Gilad Ratman, The Workshop (still), 2013. Video.
Ratman works primarily with film and installation, often distorting and disrupting narrative as a way to examine the friction between the real and imaginary. The opposition between universal patterns of human behaviour and obsessions with “nowness”—as defined through language, nationality, government or other kinds of representation—is a key concern in Ratman’s work, expressed through gestures that draw attention to resistance, struggle and a return to the primordial, especially in ways of communication.
The Workshop documents the journey of a community of people from Israel to Venice, through a non-linear presentation of video, installation, sound and a physical intervention in the fabric of the Pavilion itself. The site-specificity of the work meditates on the dichotomy of a surface and what lies beyond it. In video terms, Ratman plays with the idea of breaking up the screen and the space of the pavilion, as actors seem to come out of the screens and fade back into them.
While present-time political reality all over the world creates more and more boundaries and barriers, The Worshop’s site-specificity reflects on the Biennale as a utopian model of nations’ connectivity. Ratman shows a world where transit can take place across national borders in hidden networks—free, undetected and unidentified. For this—operating in small communities in a utopian, pre-social and even pre-linguistic stage, as the ones recurrent in Ratman’s work—is essential.
Gilad Ratman
Gilad Ratman was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1975, and studied at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design (BFA), Jerusalem, and then at Columbia University (MFA), New York. Solo exhibitions have included Ferenbalm-Gurbü Station, Karlsruhe (2011); Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv (2010); and the Haifa Museum of Art (2009).
Group exhibitions have included Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); UNNATURAL, Bass Musuem of Art, Miami Beach (2012); ARTLV Biennale, Herzliya Contemporary Art Biennial, Herzliya, Israel (2011); Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder/Greif Hunters, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2011); How Soon is Now? the Garage Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2010); Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, (2010); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2010); and Seedlings, Dallas Contemporary Art Center (2010).
Ratman has been awarded the Anslem Kiefer Prize by the Wolf Foundation (2011); Art Matters Grant (2010); Jerome Foundation (2010); The Ministry of Culture “Young Artist” Prize (2007) and the Givon Prize of Tel Aviv Museum (2005).
Ratman’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa; and American University Museum, Washington DC. Gilad Ratman lives in Tel Aviv.
Gilad Ratman is represented by Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Curator and commissioners
The Workshop is curated by Sergio Edelsztein, Director and Chief Curator, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.
The Pavilion of Israel is commissioned by Michael Gov and Arad Turgeman, realized under the auspices of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture and Sport, Israel.
Israeli Pavilion
The Israeli Pavilion was designed in 1952 by Zeev Rechter, widely considered to be one of Israel’s founding fathers of modernist architecture. The pavilion is located in the Giardini della Biennale and, unusually, has three exhibition floors. www.bravermangallery.com/ratman-biennale
