The 588 Project / Multipillory

Gilad Ratman presents two new video works for their Israeli premier. The 588 Project will be installed on the ground level, while Multipillory, filmed only a few weeks prior to installation will take over the basement level for its global premier. The 588 Project was filmed in Arkansas in an improvised site that serves as a studio for creating submergence fetish films. Members of this community perform full, vertical submergence in mud-pits to the point of disappearance. For this project, Ratman investigated members’ activity so as to create a new image. The 588 Project is a two-channel video installation that depicts muddy heads bubbling up from swamp-ground, breathing through plastic tubes. The acoustics and visuals merge into a disturbing, bodily and erotic event. Multipillory is a video installation based on the medieval torture device dubbed the “pillory”. The filmed project depicts 12 individuals penetrating a simulated tropical forest with their heads. The cruel and the humiliating unite with the comic and absurd in this piece so as to create a structure that exposes its parts. This exhibition continues Ratman’s investigation of the untenable aspects of human behavior by exploring the appearance of pain, struggle and the wild. His works create and scrutinizes imaginary hybrids of nature and culture, in which the untouched and the artificial merge into a familiar/alien entity.

Gilad Ratman was born in Israel in 1975. Ratman graduated from the Columbia University (NY) MFA program this year, and holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design (Jerusalem), through which he also attended the School of Visual Arts (NY) as an exchange student. Ratman has exhibited in numerous of international group exhibitions, including Real Time: Israeli Art 1998-2008, at Israel Museum (Jerusalem) in 2008, Teritorial Bodies at the Museum Beelden Aan Zee (Haag) also in 2008, Why don’t you say it at the Herzliya Museum of Art in 2005 and the Video Art Festival in Beijing in 2003. Ratman has been awarded prestigious art-awards, amongst them the Isracard prize for Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum in 2007, the Ministry of Culture “Young Artist” Prize in 2006 and the Joshua Rabinuvich Found for the Arts in 2004. His solo exhibitions include Che Che The Gorgeous, Ferenbalm-Gurbrü Station (Karlsruhe) in 2008 and The end of Cordova, The Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv) in 2006. Ratman lives and works in New York and Tel Aviv.