Ruti Sela
Winner of Kiefer Scholarship 2009
Ruti Sela creates provocative, incisive, and uncompromising video works. Her work is characterized by humor, almost ruthless curiosity, and meticulous aesthetics. It is focused on the Israeli experience, drawing from it universally human statements. She begins at the margins and then moves toward the center. At the same time, she deals with the relationship between words, images, and sound, and explores the relationship between fantasy and reality in both art and life.
Sela skillfully identifies, extracts, and presents sharp and precise moments of humanity that are both disturbing and moving. Through the camera, she observes people whom she marks and collects from the Israeli landscape—people who are often looked at but not really liked: nighttime passengers on an intercity bus, demonstrators against the Pride Parade in Jerusalem, prostitutes, “good boys” seeking bizarre sexual encounters on online dating sites, partygoers gathered in a nightclub’s restroom. Through them, she examines accepted perceptions and values, deconstructs them, and reconstructs them.
At first glance, Sela’s video works seem to belong to the genre of documentary cinema. A closer look reveals that she does not settle for mere documentation or voyeurism. The camera’s prominent presence turns the filmed events into a kind of performance in which she actively participates. In most of her films, she manipulates the filmed subjects through verbal and physical provocations. At the same time, she adopts the behavior and appearance of the people she films.
In one of her films, she even swaps places with the filmed subject, blurring the usual dichotomy of object-subject in the Western art tradition. The artistic language she has developed also contains characteristics of the television “reality” genre.
Through manipulative temptation, she maneuvers her “actors” into situations of physical and emotional exposure, examining the accepted separations of the intimate and the public, the real and the false, the good and the bad. Sela’s excellent control of the photographic medium, the meticulous editing of the films, and the accompanying sound create a rich and seductive visual language.