Guy Ben-Ner is best known for making inventive low-tech videos that appropriate and re-contextualise myths and well known literary tales using his family as the central protagonists. By using amateur actors, film sets and homemade props he has managed to create works that are witty and ingenious but also extremely tender and often magical.
Previous works include a re-telling of Moby Dick 2000 in the kitchen of his apartment, using himself and his daughter to re-enact the tale, and Ostrich Chick 2003, a video presented as a nature documentary showing the path of a migrating ostrich through the eyes of a young chick. The underlying exploration is of the experience of immigration. Most recently Stealing Beauty 2007, a video made in various IKEA stores around the world, saw his family take to living in the store using its various domestic spaces without permission. It examines the notion of 'stealing' using both his son's misdemeanours and the concept of stealing moments in each IKEA store they visit. Despite their comedy and wit, the films remain poignant and have an underlying engagement with the everyday, the nature of family life and domesticity.
In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow. It is a video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between ' fact and fiction. One part of the video is shot as a documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control the other.
In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner's video owes much to the plays of Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act In the documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a lonely tree, to tell two different stories - one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables - the use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour - and mimics their strategies to manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and again.
The documentary and the fiction mirror each other and thus the fiction becomes the reality, questioning the parameters of both concepts, whilst also examining the peculiar and blurred power relationships between the trainer and the trained.
Kyla McDonald
[LESS]Guy Ben-Ner is best known for making inventive low-tech videos that appropriate and re-contextualise myths and well known literary tales using his family as the central protagonists. By using amateur actors, film sets and homemade props he has managed to create works that are witty and ingenious but also extremely tender and often magical.
Previous works include a re-telling of Moby Dick 2000 in the kitchen of his apartment, using himself and his daughter to re-enact the tale, and Ostrich Chick 2003, a video presented as a nature documentary showing the path of a migrating ostrich through the eyes of a young chick. The underlying exploration is of the experience of immigration. Most recently Stealing Beauty 2007, a video made in various IKEA stores around the world, saw his family take to living in the store using its various domestic spaces without permission. It examines the notion of 'stealing' using both his son's misdemeanours and the concept of stealing moments in each IKEA store they visit. Despite their comedy and wit, the films remain poignant and have an underlying engagement with the everyday, the nature of family life and domesticity.
In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow. It is a video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between ' fact and fiction. One part of the video is shot as a documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control the other.
In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner's video owes much to the plays of Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act In the documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a lonely tree, to tell two different stories - one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables - the use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour - and mimics their strategies to manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and again.
The documentary and the fiction mirror each other and thus the fiction becomes the reality, questioning the parameters of both concepts, whilst also examining the peculiar and blurred power relationships between the trainer and the trained.
Kyla McDonald
