Dorothee: I would like to start with the first iteration of the (M)otherland project, which actually happened in Zurich in the OnCurating Project Space. We are very proud to say that we showed your work for the first time in Europe. And the curator was Maayan Sheleff. I love the project; it was so humorous and so advanced in using digital technology.

Ruth: Yes, in 2021.

Dorothee: Could you speak a little bit about it, about developments since this first iteration and your pavilion in Venice.

Ruth: The way I stumbled upon these deities, these figurines, it happened almost accidentally when I was focusing on the late Moshe Dayan, who was the Israeli JFK, and an amateur archeologist. He was a widely admired general who was loved by the West, and known for his love of women, archeology and war. Proof of how admired he was by the West is that in the series Mad Men (set in the Sixties-Seventies), the writers in the copy room of the ad agency, which is the most masculine place on earth, had a poster of Moshe Dayan in the background. When I was researching him, it was like a coin drop, I suddenly understood the patriarchal aspects of identity in Israel via its relationship to archaeology. Through him I learned about the female figurines from the biblical era.

It was only in 2020, when I was an Artport resident, that I started my journey in women’s clinics in Israel. Until 2018, I was living in the States. My journey into medical treatment in Israel started in 2020, just when Covid 19 started. I did a genetic test and realized that I had inherited my father’s genetic mutation, which increases your likelihood of getting breast and ovarian cancer, in other words in your reproductive organs. One of the many unknown facts is that until very recently, people did not associate prostate cancer with cancer of the female reproductive organs. When I got the diagnosis in Israel, the mandatory approach to BRCA is to go into fertility preservation treatment. I was holding in my hands the digital copy of these female deities, from the Dayan collection, and then I realised that we have the shared destiny of being questioned as to whether we are fertility figures or not. I did not know if I wanted to be a mother, but the medical world tried to make me into a mother. In parallel, this fertility deity, is a female sculpture dating back to 500 BC is an enigma for international archaeology, where predominantly men are looking at this figurine with its enlarged breasts saying, “It has such big breasts. It must be a fertility goddess.”

So that’s when the (M)otherland project was initiated. I started working on it, as a big project with the curator Mayan Sheleff. We had ideas about where we want to show it, the OnCurating Project Space in Zurich being stop number one. In 2021, the project was still in development stages. I was thinking about the relationship between the project as a conceptual, philosophical idea and my lived experience. In 2021, I was still not undertaking many medical treatments. I was imagining what they would be, how they would feel. In the Zurich iteration, it was such an amazing opportunity because one of the predominant space’s main aims is to prioritise writing and research.

(M)otherland, Exhibition View, OnCurating Project Space, Zurich, 2021.

The Covid 19 vaccination triggered all sorts of women’s issues because obviously these things are never actually well researched. I was almost going into another realm. My priceless possession from that exhibition is the magazine.[1] The first iteration of the (M)otherland magazine was a gateway into all these questions. All these things are still very anchored in the basics of the project, Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble,”[2] for instance, and the text by Sophie Lewis dealing with the relationship between surrogacy and labour, third party labour.[3] So, like Waze, Uber, for example, these new labour systems. Surrogacy has been outsourced to third world countries. In the magazine, you can see so much brainstorming around trying to figure out, the relationship between the very ancient past and the technological future, thinking about what we project onto the female figure. It was an opportunity to organise a lot of thinking and research. We prioritised the writing aspect of the show. And then a survey installation, which to a certain extent was brainstorming around what the project would be. It had 6000 years of art in the land of Israel hitting on me, a bit like the figurines catcalling the audience. It had the wild boars roaming the streets of Haifa. It had this text, which I really like, that I wrote with a German friend about the wild boars in Haifa being like a Judd Apatow film where Amy Schumer, the main character, is a woman who’s drinking too much and abusing substances, and therefore will not be an eloquent mother. 

One of the interesting things about Zurich was thinking about hideaways, like ‘situated knowledges’. A lot of these things for Israelis would be very obvious. For example, for an Israeli when you see an archaeo­lo­gical relic, you recognise it since you’ve studied it in school, you’ve seen it in your elementary school. You know what the object is, you know what it represents. But then bringing it to Europe, there are different local attributes to the object and different international understandings of the object. I learned a lot from that gap.

Upward Facing Dog, 2020, 3D prints, 32 Inch TV and TV Arm, OnCurating Project space, Zurich, 2021.

Dorothee: For me your work in Zurich was really extremely surprising and fresh. It is so rare that you get so much humor in a work. There was this lightness, the figurines dancing to contemporary music. It was really surprising and a feminist work.

Later in 2022, you were nominated for the Pavilion in Venice. Your application for the pavilion in Venice was accepted on 7 September 2023. Which is exactly a month before 7 October attacks.

Ruth: I view the project as an accumulation. Constantly, more and more parts evolved. I admit naivete, when back in 2018, I still did not recognise the amount of underlying patriarchal oppression within different systems. But the more I got into thinking of the (M)otherland project, the more I realised how it works on the biopolitical stage, how it works in this place, it was like hitting a rock and then opening this stream of narrations and possibilities.

When we applied to Venice, obviously nothing yet was made. I wanted to create new work for the show. So, in any case, most of the works made especially for Venice. Most of the works are based on archives, documents and documentations. The overall research happened in between 2021 and 2023. I think contemporary art has the privilege of reacting to current events.

It was very clear to me that I was going to add new works, and I was going to react to what was happening. But obviously what was happening was quite chaotic. There’s also something not fair about reacting in a state of confusion. I tried to figure out how do I react mindfully without taking advantage of the trauma, the pain or any of it. My first intuition was to go back to Mesopotamian literature, 5000-year-old traditions that are also from the Levant region. And then honing on this idea of women’s practice of keening, of lamentation. This idea of the wailing woman who, in her grief, performed a political act. Knowing that I wouldn’t know what I’d feel like by April, but I’d know that grief and anger were always going to be there, with a whole heart. That is what I felt in that moment.

So, I went on to produce, this new work, based on keening, which is fragmented, the figurines are broken and shattered and some of them are glued back together. They are walking the streets of Tel Aviv demonstrating, because that’s what my life was like then, I was demonstrating at least once or twice a week. At the time the decision that I made with the curators, whom I was working with on the show, was that we shouldn’t react too fast.

Dorothee: In the leftwing daily newspaper TAZ the work was described by Hili Perlson as follows: “Some of the giant clay figures in Patir’s animated videos are missing heads or limbs, with cracks running along their round bodies, just like the real archaeological artefacts they are modelled on. These images of broken women embody a universal pain, the anger of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters around the world.”[4]

How did the process between you and the curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalith develop then?

Ruth: We saw the art world reacting impromptu, too fast after 7 October, in ways that people felt were problematic in hindsight. Our first rule was that we are not reacting. We’re not doing fast reactions. We’re not doing gut-based reactions. We’re keeping our mouth shut and trying to feel and think about how and where we situate ourselves. And as the months persevered, we felt that the Israeli government was doing heinous crimes instead of making diplomatic agreements. During all this time I kept on making work. Our decision was that we were going to Venice because we were ashamed of our government, but we weren’t ashamed of ourselves. And we’re going to install the exhibition completely as we envisioned it. And then we’ll see. 

To be honest, when we got there, first, there was just like this feeling of disconnect right between beautiful Venice, rich art world cocktail parties, gondolas on the river, and the trauma. We were both passive observers and players. And in the end we came with this idea that since the pavilion is made of glass, has a glass facade because it’s a Bauhaus building, you could fill it with art, but keep the door closed.

This means that you have this half closed, half open performance, which is something that felt novel, it felt right, like it was unexpected, it reflected in a way the rather complicated situation. It was like either we’re Russia and we’re going to shut the curtains and leave, or we’re Zionists or propagandists. It was the idea of saying, no, we’re neither of these things.

We’re reacting to a time and then the time is fragile, and we feel complicated. We did install everything. And the first floor was the procession lamentation piece that was always going to be on the first floor, because it’s public.

This work is dealing most with the public life—while the top floor went all the way up to the private space, to my apartment. Public to the private in this hierarchical way.

That one film out of five ended up being the only work seen from the street view, attached to the sign which said that the exhibition will open: “The Artist and curators will open the exhibition once a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached”. And another thing that we were very adamant about was not to say that the exhibition is closed, but rather that the exhibition will open. It became sort of like our wishful thinking of a changing reality. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Not yet. Not then. And not since then do we have a ceasefire with Gaza, still, and the hostages weren’t released, still.

But maybe very naively when we put the sign up, we really, actually thought it might be possible in one month, two weeks sort of thing. We did not think that it would be for the whole show. We had like a different idea. I’m sure you remember. But at the time we became these objects of projection, it seemed like everyone was projecting upon us their political views. I oftentimes felt like a Rorschach painting, you know?

A sign placed by the artists and curators of the Israel Pavilion at its closed entrance, street view, The Israel Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Image: Tal Nisim.

(M)otherland, exhibition installation detail, The Israel Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Image: Tal Nisim.

(M)otherland, exhibition view, The Israel Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Image: Matteo de Mayda for The New York Times.

Dorothee: Yes, I understand.

Ruth: People look at me and they just see what they think, it has nothing to do with what I represent or what I stand for. It has nothing to do with how I feel about myself. It has everything to do with what they feel about whatever they think I am. It did give me the opportunity to say what I think in the New York Times or in the Der Spiegel. It gave me a voice that otherwise I would never have had.

Dorothee: But it must have been also very, very hard, to encounter so much hatred, wasn’t it? (A boycott letter call asked the Italians to stop the Israeli Pavillon from showing at all, it came out in January, in April you decided to install everything but open only under the descriped conditions. The letter garnered over 20,000 signatures.)[5]

Ruth: I mean, it was all very hard, to be honest. There were moments where it was really, really devastating. But I think those were more like moments in December, you know, or November, five months before the opening, there were the really, really hard moments where I realised that my voice will just never be accurate to my feelings, that I lost agency a long time before the opening of Venice.

I would think about Meirav Svirsky, a fellow artist, whose parents were killed in bed, whose brother was killed in captivity, who lost her entire life. I would think about, the Palestinian women demonstrating against the War in Gaza and the personal risk that they were taking. All these women reminded me that in comparison to real problems, an artist’s boycott is just not so important.

So, the demonstration by women, these women I wanted to mention, to show. Like a mantra of sorrow and of courage.

Keening, video still, 2024, 2:30 min, 2024.

Keening, video still, 2024, 2:30 min, 2024.

Dorothee: Of course, one sees that the Israeli Left really try to make the government react otherwise, to negotiate and get the hostages out. These people are still in captivity. I ask myself if one can speak to terrorists, if one can negotiate. I’m not so sure about it.

Ruth: I might be naïve, I don’t think people are born violent or evil. I really believe this is a result of oppression and not nature.

I’m not saying that it’s only Israel’s fault, but I am saying that there is a mutual influence that causes people who have never left their homes and have been under siege for 20 years to become very violent. And I personally don’t believe that this level of hatred can be avoided if they are not given any other option. I still condemn violence.

But I still think that there are terrorists within the settler movement (in the West Bank) of the fundamentalist right, which is currently in government and inciting other groups on the other side. To be honest, at this moment I feel a lack of empathy towards both sides equally.

But you know, this is like, again, this is very much my education. I grew up with a Holocaust survivor grandmother who I was very, very close to, who was in her 20s during the war. So, she was already married, already a graduate of the Warsaw University for law.

My grandmother whom I’ve been thinking about this week because, her house and the house my mother grew up in, is in Tel Aviv, near Tel Aviv University. And missiles hit parallel streets. Her house wasn’t demolished. I mean, the house she lived in but other houses close by. She, my grandmother, who died at 99, who survived so many different phases of history, was one of the funniest women I ever met. She was hilarious.
Her humour was always quite macabre. Humour is a survival skill.

Not only was she a very funny woman, but also very much a humanist. And, throughout the years, she always made a point when she talked to us about the war, she would say that the war did not happen to the Jewish people. It happened to the world. And that if we isolate the Shoah as a singular event that only happened to the Jews we will stand as bystanders when we see it happening to other people. So, we need to make sure that it never happens to any other people in in the future. And with that education, I can’t isolate villains.

That’s just like my nature and it’s my ideology. And even though I’ve contested it and there are moments in time where I’m less capable of being within that enlightenment, humanist or European perspective, some moments are easier for me and some are not. It is something I very much believe in.

Dorothee: I’m not so sure. I grew up with my father, who was always shaking, his whole body was shaking when he spoke about the Nazi Regime, his father, (my grandfather) was a German bourgeois anti-fascist.[6] When my father spoke about the time I just felt his immense fear, a fear of other people—who were capable of doing the most horrible things, so I saw that evil exists. Evil exists, through indoctrinated fanatics who act in a kind of psychosis. And I see this type reappearing. It’s actually easy to recognise: they know everything for sure, they are completely certain, they don’t want to talk, they shout and spit, they knock over microphones, they don’t want to talk, discuss ideas or listen, they threaten and they are violent—they hate facts and love fake images. 

After the (non)opening you became a screen for projections. That must have been very, very hard to bear.

Ruth: Yes. It’s very hard not to be insulted when people are trying to insult you. The exhibition closed on the 24 November without ever being open. For a year I was an object of projection without any of my art to being seen. Most people within this profession will probably never see the art. But in March it opened at the Tel Aviv Museum, there was a change, I got the art back.

(M)otherland, exhibition view, The Israel Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Image: Tal Nisim.

Petah Tikva (Waiting), video still, 3D animation and news live feed, 2024.

Dorothee: Let’s speak about the part in Venice, which was there but could not been seen.

Ruth: So, the concept for the big exhibition in Venice included now my lived experiences going through these different medical treatments.

Dorothee: There’s this special humour involved. The figurines express a matriarchal type, which resists patriarchal treatment, to be objectified. You also added parts of your apartment as a printout. 

Ruth: Well, about the Venice iteration, which is also different, but similar to the Tel Aviv Museum iteration. It was built on going from public to private, which I see as the most singular attributes of the Israeli identity. The project touches upon the issue: there is no boundary between the private and the public. Even the most precious private, the uterus or the women, the woman’s body is always recruited for the national agenda. And are all, if we like it or not, soldiers of this narrative. Therefore, it was important that the project portrays the street.

The hidden part goes all the way into my apartment’s bathroom, so all the way into the most private, most intimate space, and that’s why I decided that the main film would be viewed from inside my living room. Of course, it’s not my actual living room it’s a simulation. Everything is computer generated. I already had to build my apartment in order to film in my apartment within the computer, I also brought my apartment into the show, as a printout. And it functions as a background to this three-chapter film that chronicles the three egg freezing rounds that I performed to complete my preservation journey. I think what a lot of people barely notice, is that my apartment has tons of Easter eggs, and there are numerous books. For instance, all the articles that are quoted within the OnCurating catalogue are in the library in my living room. I’ve been reading a lot of archaeological science articles, in a subtle way I try to make the work somehow searchable, you can find the different hidden layers.

Once it became a lived experience—I actually visited all these bureaucratic medical institutions and met all these officials, doctors—I realised that I had accepted the fact that there are no boundaries protecting privacy. For example, a doctor can have the most nonchalant, invasive conversation with me because we all have this secret pact in which I, as a woman living in Israel, have a role, and the role is mothering and the role is sometimes other things, but this is a role that is undeniably, crucial for my citizenship.

Within the OECD countries, Israel has the highest birth rate with 2.9 children. It’s a fertility obsessed place. And one of the more interesting phenomena that I noticed both during Covid but also later documenting any adventure, is that we are using the iPhone camera to create a portal to perform our private life in the public sphere. Women all around the world, but especially in Israel, are constantly performing their IVF rounds, what does it mean? And what does contemporary liberation mean, from a feminist perspective? We know from postmodern discourse that feminism is about giving women agency. And making them not the object but the subject.

But then when it comes to contemporary social media, we see women performing their fertility windows within public spaces. And this becomes more complicated. Who are they performing for? Are they gaining agency by performing this intimacy or are they just victims of surveillance capitalism? I don’t have any of these answers, but the project tries to touch upon all these topics by making my private apartment into a stage of performance.

Petah Tikva (Waiting), video still, 3D animation and news live feed, 2024.

Intake, video still, 2:30, 3D animation, 2024.

M Otherland, video still , 2024, 30 min, 2024.

Dorothee: I think it’s interesting that different ideals of male and female roles exist in parallel or in layers in Israeli society. As a male model, the masculine, soldierly man described by you also exists simultaneously or in parallel with the ideal of the learned man; in this constellation, the woman can also be responsible for the income of the family. And then in the socialist kibbutz, where in the early days equality between the sexes was to be achieved at all costs and private property was to be dispensed with. Not to mention the cultural influences from all the countries of origin of the Israelis, Europe, Arab countries, the Soviet Union lately. I think one can feel this multi-layeredness of roles that exist in your work.

Ruth: A lot of my work has to do with finding my agency as an artist. I used to make orthodox films, old school real movies not animated movies.

Because you are always dependent on a big crew. You need a director of photography, an editor, lighting instructor, a sound engineer. The crew is always so big and it’s predominantly masculine. Mainly men work on film sets. It’s a very masculine environment. My fear of technology or my feeling of not understanding technology stopped me from achieving my independence. As slowly as the work progressed, I found that I was eager to dismantle the sphere and become technological myself. I am annoyed by that sort of alpha male character that takes your phone to fix something and doesn’t teach you how to fix it yourself. I learned late how important it is to be in control of apparatuses to be really able to express yourself in a complex way.

With this five-year long project that I’ve been working on investigating women’s role within nation states and as historical narratives I touched on topics like humor, sincerity, intimacy, and the performance of violence and power. I’m also a sinner. I’m also doing things that I don’t think are idealistically fair. For example, stealing people’s voices and I’m secretly recording them, and I’m abusing them in order to tell a story. 

Dorothee: Yes, the doctors, for example. I think that was interesting because it is probably an experience every woman of the Western world has already gone through at some point of being handled or being rectified by the medical apparatus.

Ruth: Handled is a perfect way of describing it.

Ruth Patir fuses documentary with computer-generated imagery in a quest to expand the possibilities of realism. Ruth’s works often begin with the artist’s autobiography, and gradually open up to address larger societal issues, such as the politics of gender, technology, and the hidden mechanisms of power. What began with her exhibition Love Letters to Ruth—where she resurrected the late IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan and summoned him to be her 3D lover— has evolved into an ongoing exploration of representation, reproduction, and biopolitics in patriarchal Israel. In her recent works, Patir breathes life into archaeological artifacts from the Levant, focusing on female figurines that allow her to weave together her personal story with women’s lives today. Her most recent project, (M)otherland, commissioned for the Israeli Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is currently on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Patir work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art My Father in the Cloud 2022. Her film Sleepers won first prize in the Video Art and Experimental Film competition at the Jerusalem Film Festival (2017). Additional works have been shown at the Center of digital Art Holon Pavilion at the Gwanjou Biennale in Korea, the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), OnCurating Gallery in Zurich, the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, the Anthology Film Archives, the Municipal Gallery Line 16, Jerusalem Design Week and the Flux Factory collective in New York. Patir holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (2011) and an MFA from Columbia University in New York (2015). Her works are included in private collections as well as in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, and the Jewish Museum in New York.

Dorothee Richter, PhD, is Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she directs the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. She previously served as head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS/MAS) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was artistic director at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, as well as an archive on feminist practices entitled Materialien/Materials. Together with Ronald Kolb, Richter directed a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now, Fluxus Explored with a Camera. Her most recent project was Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone, a collaborative exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2024. This project was co-curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb) and ARKO (curator Haena Noh, producer Haebin Lee). Richter is Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin.