Edited by Joshua Simon.
Texts by Yair Garbuz, Julia Moritz, Eduardo Thomas, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Vít Havránek, and Joshua Simon.
Published by Archive Books.
Ruti Sela’s work borders both cinema and video art as it activates and documents power relations performed through sexuality, militarism, parenthood, and professional relations as these take shape around the camera.
The monograph Ruti Sela: For the Record, is published following her solo exhibition at MoBY Museums of Bat Yam, Israel (2014), and in conjunction with the exhibition traveling to the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) in 2015.
Working in the last decade, Sela’s aesthetic proposal portrays a moment in which the presence of the camera operates on different capacities—from the contrived to the authentic, from the manipulative to the surveying, from a device of self-performance to a documentation apparatus. Using the camera as a participant and as the precursor and prerequisite for the filmed event, Sela often requests the participants to hold the camera and document the event by themselves.
This gesture is present in the book in many ways. Eduardo Thomas bases his essay on his conversations with Sela in Mexico DF, attempting to perform some of Sela’s interviewing techniques; Ana Teixeira Pinto addresses the contexts of Sela’s work in relation to the daily presence of violence, constraint and oppression in Israel-Palestine; Julia Moritz examines the place of radicality in relation to Sela’s work; Yair Garbuz observes the specific portraiture qualities in Sela’s films; Vít Havránek and Joshua Simon converse with Sela’s films, raising questions due to the artist’s refusal to submit herself to an interview.
Ruti Sela was born in 1974. She graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and the Film Department of the Tel Aviv University. Her work has been shown internationally at various exhibitions and venues, including the 2006 Biennale of Sydney; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; Berlin Biennial, 2010; Manifesta 8, 2010; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Centre Pompidou; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Art in General, New York; Tel Aviv Museum; Tate Modern; and Jeu de Paume, Paris. Sela has received a number of prizes and scholarships, among them the Minister of Culture Prize and the Anselm Kiefer prize. In 2009, together with Maayan Amir, she initiated The Exterritory Project which won the award for young artists from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011.
Ruti Sela: For the Record is a project by MoBY Museums of Bat Yam, Israel; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), The Netherlands; and tranzit.cz, Czech Republic; and is published by Archive Books (Berlin, Germany).
Book launch
Tuesday, 20 January, 9pm
Tel Aviv Cinemateque
2 Sprinzak Street
Tel Aviv-Jaffa
With screenings of films by Ruti Sela and a talk with Ruti Sela, Yair Garbuz, Vít Havránek and Joshua Simon
Exhibition at SMBA
8 February–29 March 2015
Opening: Sunday, 8 February, 4–6pm
With a public talk by Joshua Simon
