New York’s Jewish Museum to Present US Premiere of Ruth Patir’s Installation from Israeli Pavilion at 2024 Venice Biennale

A video installation at the center of high-profile controversy at the 2024 Venice Biennale will go on view this winter in New York, marking its US premiere.

New York–born, Tel Aviv–based artist Ruth Patir’s video installation (M)otherland was purchased by the Jewish Museum just months after the artist closed the Israeli Pavilion in protest over her country’s war in Gaza. At the time, Patir said the pavilion would open once the war was over, which did not occur during the run of the 2024 Biennale.

To create the piece, the artist animated Iron Age female figurines that are often associated with fertility. Initially made with four videos, the piece is based on her experience in the health care industry after receiving fertility treatment following a diagnosis of a gene mutation, according to a release. The videos employ audio of the artist’s conversations with various people, with the figurines standing in for the artist and the women around her. The piece explores bodily autonomy, medicalization, and state intervention in health care, with particular attention to Israel’s state-funded practice of in-vitro fertilization (IVF).

In the two years since, the artist has added a fifth video, Keening, addressing collective mourning and rage after October 7, 2023, in which Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 more hostage.

The artist’s, per Patir’s website, “fuses documentary with computer-generated imagery in a quest to expand the possibilities of realism,” adding that her 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.”

Since earning an MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2015, Patir had a 2022 solo exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, and her 2017 film Sleepers won the video and experimental cinema and video art award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Her work has appeared in international shows including the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, and her work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other venues.

Patir’s presentation for the Israeli Pavilion, curated by Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, had been announced on September 5, 2023, just a month before the Hamas attack. The three initially said, two weeks after the attack, that they would go ahead with the presentation. By February 2024, Israel had rained down destruction on Gaza, killing thousands of civilians including women and children, and destroying civilian infrastructure, earning censure from the international community. Thousands of artists would appeal to the Biennale Foundation, which organizes the Venice festival, to drop the country’s pavilion, saying that “the Biennale is platforming a genocidal apartheid state”; the Italian culture minister rejected their appeal. 

That April, Patir shuttered the pavilion on the first day of professional previews of the 2024 Biennale, leaving on view just one work, visible from outside, but protesters gathered outside the Israeli and nearby US pavilions just the same. Patir then said the pavilion would remain closed until a cease-fire and hostage release agreement was reached. An armistice between Israel and Hamas-led groups, allowing for the exchange of hostages and prisoners, was reached on January 19, 2025.

“I hate it,” the artist said, “but I think it’s important.”