My videos and installations address apparently untenable aspects of human behaviour by exploring the need for community and by showing forms of resistance and the borders of self. Pushing narrative to its borders and allowing for a fractured chain of events to take place, the work functions as a vehicle for me to explore the friction between the real and the imaginary. Violating the correlation between cause and effect, my videos undermine trust in the cinematic apparatus and open a space for the poetic and the pathetic to coexist. In some works, production and what is normally conceived of as ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘the making of’ is an integral part of the work. The participants are not acting, in the sense of representation, but merely responding to a given situation, often based on physical restrictions and unfamiliar situations. A representation of Nature plays a significant role in my work, usually serving as a ‘petri dish’ for human interaction or a violent act. This violence, I assume, not only happens within the borders of the frame, but also embedded in the condition of viewing and reproduced by the act of watching. Each work strives to articulate a point of view that is rather external and reporting in order to try and deal with the formations of identity and the borders of ‘self’, without being subordinated to the mechanism of viewers’ identification. For the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award, I’m presenting a body of work consisting of a video installation and two photographic images. The mulitipillory is a video installation in which twelve people are sticking their heads through a large image mounted to a wooden structure. Based on the medieval torture devices known as ‘stocks’ or ‘pillories’, it suggests intimacy out of necessity and humiliation out of context. The Boggymen is a collage made out of found photografic materials—a self-documentation of a person who calls himself ‘The Boggyman’ and is performing ‘total submergence’ in mud for his own pleasure. His head, mostly covered with mud, protrudes from the surface.

Gilad Ratman