The Jewish Museum in New York has acquired a video installation by the artist Ruth Patir that was commissioned for the Venice Biennale. It was never displayed, since Patir and the curators insisted that Israel’s pavilion not open until an agreement was reached for the return of hostages taken in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023 and for a cease-fire in the Gaza war.
Patir’s “(M)otherland” will debut in March at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum announced Monday, and then will travel to New York after the Jewish Museum’s collection galleries are reinstalled later next year.
The museum declined to disclose the price it paid for “(M)otherland,” which comprises five videos, one made in reaction to the Gaza war and offering a personal view of global tragedy. Four video pieces use ancient female figurines retrieved by archaeologists from the eastern Mediterranean to dramatize Patir’s decision to freeze her eggs after learning that she carries the BRCA gene mutation — an odyssey through an Israeli social system that encourages childbearing and aggressively funds fertility procedures. The small figurines, blown up to life-size dimensions and digitally animated, walk the halls of Israeli clinics, check their iPhones in the waiting rooms, and inject themselves with hormones.
The exhibit also includes a fifth video piece, “Keening,” in which the figurines — some now shattered — are reimagined as participants in a display of public mourning following last year’s attack.
In a phone interview last week from Berlin, where she was finishing an artist residency, Patir, 40, said she harbored no regrets over the decision not to open at the Venice Biennale.
“There is a moment in which you are power itself,” she said, “and you have to act not as power has acted before, but as you want power to act.”
At the Biennale, she added, works are shown as countries’ official entries. “So for then I refused to participate in that platform during a time of a devastating war and ongoing hostage crisis,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I feel I am not allowed to make work, or that I think a public shouldn’t see it in other contexts.”
The Biennale closed on Nov. 24. There is still no cease-fire in Gaza, where the war has raged for over a year. Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 and abducted 240 people. The Israeli military responded with a ferocious military campaign in which more than 41,000 people have been killed, according to local health authorities, including many women and children. And there is still no deal for the approximately 60 living Israeli hostages that Israeli authorities say remain in Gaza.
“Every time someone had asked me if it was still not open or if anything has changed,” Patir said of the closed Israel pavilion, “I would have to remind them that nothing has changed.”
She added, “I really didn’t imagine it was going to stay like this.”
(Artists have since responded in a variety of ways to the Gaza war. Last month, more than 40 artists announced a Gaza Biennale as “a call to the world, to artists and cultural institutions, to stand in solidarity with Palestinian artists.”)
Patir said she was excited to be associated with the Jewish Museum, which hosted a talk with her in October and which she credited with “helping communicate the idea of our decision to the diaspora” after the Venice Biennale opened.
“We are honored to bring Ruth Patir’s powerful and poignant work to U.S. audiences,” James S. Snyder, the Jewish Museum’s director, said Monday in a statement, adding that the acquisition was “underscoring our commitment to collecting and showcasing work that invites dialogue and reflects on universal issues.”
First the work will be displayed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel’s oldest art museum. Over the past year, a public plaza next to the museum has become known as “Hostage Square,” an impromptu headquarters and art space for hostages’ families in their efforts to pressure their government into a deal for those abducted on Oct. 7.
Mira Lapidot, the chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, said in an interview last week that she is glad Patir’s supporters in Israel’s art community will have the opportunity to see “(M)otherland.” Lapidot and Tamar Margalit were the two curators of the Israel pavilion who decided with Patir not to open in Venice. (Lapidot and Margalit are also sisters.)
“Good proposals manage to straddle things: they are highly specific, and, by being highly specific, become universal,” Lapidot said. “There’s something very specific to Ruth and to the Israeli condition, but then again speaks to a much larger audience.”
Patir said there were resonances between “(M)otherland,” which was years in the making, and its recent role in international culture and politics.
“A big component of my work,” Patir said, “is the relationship between the public and the private in the context of places like Israel — societies where we’re constantly thinking of ourselves as being an ambassador abroad.”
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