Guy Ben-Ner

Guy Ben-Ner (born January 4, 1969, Ramat Gan, Israel) is an Israeli video artist who features himself and his family as actors in his humorous and profound productions. His story lines make pointed reference to well-known works of literature, philosophy, art, and cinema.

Ben-Ner studied at Hamidrasha Art School, Beit Berl College (B.Ed., 1997), in Ramat HaSharon, Israel, and later at Columbia University (M.F.A., 2003) in New York. One of his early works, Berkeley’s Island (1999), dealt with artistic constraints—in terms of setting, artistic material, and funding—and featured Ben-Ner as a lonely castaway stranded on a pile of sand in the middle of his kitchen. Filmed with a relatively inexpensive video camera and within the confines of his home, this low-budget video was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719–22). It explored themes prevalent in many of Ben-Ner’s works, such as the longing for adventure, the search for solitude, the need to play, and the way human primal desires are mediated by social structure and mores. The presence of Ben-Ner’s children in the video (and his wife as well in others) allowed him to weave back and forth between reality and fantasy, addressing the tension between family obligations and artistic and personal freedom. As his reputation grew, his works began to explore the idea of autonomy and loss inherent in being an itinerant artist of international acclaim.

In 2005 Ben-Ner represented Israel at the Venice Biennale with his video installation Treehouse Kit, which consisted of a prefabricated tree sculpture and an instructional video featuring the artist. In 2007 he completed Stealing Beauty, a mischievous guerrilla video of sorts that he filmed without permission in several IKEA department stores. Using IKEA’s showrooms as if they were the setting for a sitcom, Ben-Ner and his family performed as characters. In this video he amusingly addressed such philosophical ideas as Friedrich Engels’s thesis that the family is a tool to aid in the dissemination of capitalism. In 2009–10 Ben-Ner was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Ben-Ner’s other works included Moby Dick (2000), Household (2001), Elia—A Story of an Ostrich Chick (2003), Wild Boy (2004), I’d Give It to You If I Could, but I Borrowed It (2006–07), Second Nature (2008), If Only It Was as Easy to Banish Hunger by Rubbing the Belly as It Is to Masturbate (2009), and the “live film” Drop the Monkey (2009), which he made with no external editing, rehearsals, or other conventional elements of film for Performa 2009, the third biennial of visual art performance in New York City.

In 2012 Ben-Ner created the video Foreign Names (2012), in which he pieced together filmed segments of workers at the Israeli coffee chain Aroma. They call out such English phrases as “the state” and “oppresses”—words Ben-Ner had used instead of his name when ordering—and thus create an ode lamenting the disappearance of waiters. Soundtrack (2013) stages an alien invasion in Ben-Ner’s kitchen using the audio from a scene in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, and Escape Artists (2016) shows Ben-Ner giving classes in film theory to asylum seekers at a detention centre in Israel, demonstrating how the camera and the director shape the audience’s understanding of their subjects.