For the Record
Ruti Sela
2015
The monograph Ruti Sela: For the Record, is published following her solo exhibition at MoBY Museums of Bat Yam, Israel (2014), and in conjunction with the exhibition traveling to the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) in 2015.
Working in the last decade, Sela’s aesthetic proposal portrays a moment in which the presence of the camera operates on different capacities—from the contrived to the authentic, from the manipulative to the surveying, from a device of self-performance to a documentation apparatus. Using the camera as a participant and as the precursor and prerequisite for the filmed event, Sela often requests the participants to hold the camera and document the event by themselves.
This gesture is present in the book in many ways. Eduardo Thomas bases his essay on his conversations with Sela in Mexico DF, attempting to perform some of Sela’s interviewing techniques; Ana Teixeira Pinto addresses the contexts of Sela’s work in relation to the daily presence of violence, constraint and oppression in Israel-Palestine; Julia Moritz examines the place of radicality in relation to Sela’s work; Yair Garbuz observes the specific portraiture qualities in Sela’s films; Vít Havránek and Joshua Simon converse with Sela’s films, raising questions due to the artist’s refusal to submit herself to an interview.
- Design: Archive Appendix
- Editing: Joshua Simon.
- Texts: Yair Garbuz, Julia Moritz, Eduardo Thomas, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Vít Havránek, and Joshua Simon
- Translation: Mor Lasmi Ilan
- Language editing: Leah Rocamora, Rachel A. Katz
- Copies: 1200
- Pages: 224
- Type of binding: Softcover with flap
- Dimensions (cm): 14.8 x 21
- Reproductions: Ruti Sela
- Printing: Cassochrome, Belgium
- Binding: Cassochrome, Belgium
- Type of printing: color
- Publication: Archive Books
- Place of publication: Germany
- Supported by: MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam, tranzit.cz, SMBA Amsterdam, Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts
- Book photography: Ruti Sela
- ISBN: 9783943620276
Ruti Sela (b.1974) is an artist whose works are created at the intersection of cinema, performance, and video art. Sela documents and engages with various power dynamics. Her artworks have been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions and venues, including the Biennale of Sydney, the Istanbul Biennial, the Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, the New Museum Triennial, Israel Museum, Centre Pompidou, Art in General (NY), Tel Aviv Museum, Tate Modern, Jeu de Paume, ZKM, Ludwig Museum, HKW, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. In 2009, she initiated, together with Maayan Amir, the long-term art project Exterritory, for which they won a Young Artists Award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2011). She studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, where she graduated with distinction, and proceeded to the MFA program at the Tel Aviv University Film Department.
