Gilad Ratman to present The Workshop (2013) for the Israeli Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Gilad Ratman has been selected to present The Workshop (2013), a multichannel site-specific installation at the Israeli Pavilion at this year’s 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the Israel Ministry for Culture and Sport, Ratman is one of the youngest artists ever to be chosen for the Israeli Pavilion.

Ratman works primarily with film and installation, often distorting and disrupting narrative as a way to examine the friction between thereal and imaginary. The op position between universal patterns of human behaviour - as definedthrough language, nationality, government or other kinds of representation - is a key concern inRatman’s work, expressed through gestures that draw attention to resistance through struggle.

The Workshop documents thejourney of a community of people from Israel to Venice, through a nonlinear presentation of video, installation, sound and a physical intervention in the fabric of the Pavilion itself. The Workshop’s site-specificity reflects on the Biennale as a utopian model of nations’ connectivity.

Ratman shows a world where transit can take place across national borders in hidden networks – free, undetected and unidentified. For this – operating in small communities in a utopian, presocial and even pre-linguistic stage, as the ones recurrent in Ratman’s work – is essential.