* 1969 in Ramat Gan (IL), lives and works in Tel Aviv (IL)

Drop the Monkey, 2009

Whereas, in his earlier video works Guy Ben-Ner mostly performed before the camera along with the rest of his family – thus treating both the boundaries between public and private spheres, as well as inventively staging his own modest resources – his more recent works above all narrate the restlessness of a life in the international art context, as well as the artist’s ambiguous relationship to the amenities of his own success. In his video work Drop the Monkey, the artist conducts a dialogue with himself on the geographical distance between Berlin and Tel Aviv. The conversation is arranged as a telephone call, and since the material was all cut live on camera, Ben-Ner actually had to travel between the two cities by airplane. While picking out the conditions and the process involved in the production of the work itself along with arguments for the pros and cons of the mingling of art and life as a central theme, Ben-Ner no less draws our attention to the present-day state of (artistic) diasporic identity as marked by inner conflict and melancholy: “I WISH, I WAS SOMEWHERE ELSE.” (AM)