Museum buys artist’s work after she shut Venice Biennale exhibit in call for hostage deal

Months after Rut Patir shuttered her “(M)otherland” installation at the Venice Biennale last April, protesting for a ceasefire and hostage deal, her five-part video work was acquired by New York’s Jewish Museum and will premiere in March at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The work, a series of videos featuring digitally animated Iron Age fertility goddesses, will go on view at the Jewish Museum following the reinstallation of its collection galleries, slated for completion in the fall of 2025.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Patir, speaking to The Times of Israel. “I feel in my heart that this work has merit and that people will see it and be moved by it and that it matters. And it goes together with guilt, anger, sadness and all the things that people like me feel now.”

The original four videos in “(M)otherland” — “Petah Tikva (Waiting),” “Intake,” “Retrieval Stories,” and “Motherland” — document Patir’s experience of fertility treatment and the challenges of navigating a male-dominated medical establishment and the pressures to undergo state-funded IVF treatment.

The videos feature 3D animations of palm-sized ancient female figurines commonly identified as fertility amulets, enlarged and brought to life in a sense by Patir, often humorously, as stand-ins for herself and the women in her circle as they discuss fertility treatment.

Patir works with excavated artifacts of female figurines from the ancient Levant.

The fifth and newest video, “Keening,” was created after the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught, and features the same figurines alongside thousands of fragments usually housed in museum storage.

The forlorn, broken women in “Keening” come to life in a grief-ridden procession that eerily recalls the many rallies held over the last 14 months for the captives still held by Hamas in Gaza.

Patir, 40, a Bezalel and Columbia University graduate who fuses documentary with computer-generated imagery in her works, received notice in September 2023 that her proposed video work had been accepted for the prestigious Venice Biennale, held in April.

“It’s a short window for producing something new,” said Patir, who had to create the artwork along with raising funds for producing and installing the work.

Then the October 7 massacre took place, sending Patir and her curators into a tailspin of grief and anguish. By December, it became clear that the artwork couldn’t be displayed as planned.

“We were checking our pulse every few weeks, with a lot of turmoil on the way,” said Patir.

At a certain point, Patir, working with her curators, Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s head curator Mira Lapidot and curator Tamar Margalit — who happen to be sisters — decided to finish the installation, go to Venice and decide what to do once they were there.

“We were waiting to see what the government was doing” in relation to the ongoing hostage situation and war, said Patir.

Yet nothing went according to plan. The first Iranian attack on Israel took place on April 13, several days before the planned preview opening at the Biennale. Then Patir’s crew members got stuck on their way to Venice.

Patir and her curators did some soul-searching.

“We went to our hotel rooms,” she said. “We thought about how each scenario would feel and came to a unanimous decision.”

Patir locked the doors to her exhibition on the first preview day for the event that officially opened four days later, on April 20.

“The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached,” read the sign taped to the door of the pavilion by the Israeli team.

At the time, Patir, Lapidot and Margalit stated that they produced the work to mourn the women, Israeli and Palestinian, who lost their lives in the war and pay tribute to those held in captivity and to those left to pick up the pieces.

They also stated their belief in two states for two peoples, living in peace.

“I think [the decision to shutter the exhibit] proved to be something that opened people’s hearts and all sorts of different opinions,” said Patir. “It made people think and I felt at the time that it made people complicate their binary perception of reality.”

The Venice art event, which was open from April through November, gets a million visitors, of whom 750,000 are women, said Patir.

Patir remained for a week after the opening, seeing exhibits, spending time in Venice with her family, meeting patrons and speaking to the international press, presenting the presence of an Israeli left that cares about Gazans as well as the hostages.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art had already planned to show Patir’s work in March, said Lapidot, and she was more than pleased when the Jewish Museum, headed by James Snyder, who directed the Israel Museum for many years and worked with Lapidot when she was chief curator of the Israel Museum’s Fine Arts wing, decided to purchase the work.

The Jewish Museum declined to disclose the price it paid for “(M)otherland,” and Snyder, in a museum statement, thanked the unnamed donors who made the acquisition possible.

“I’m happy for Ruth,” said Lapidot. “So much effort and thought went into this work, and it’s a good exhibit that hasn’t been shown yet. Now it will have a stage.”

Patir’s exhibit will remain at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for about five months before moving to the Jewish Museum.

As she approaches the opening of her exhibit in Tel Aviv, Patir said she feels anxious, anticipating judgment and criticism of her art and its political positioning.

“It’s not about what I made, it’s about what I think,” she said. “And now you can’t untie them from one another. Whenever someone will see it, they will have those thoughts engraved in their system and that’s scary — it’s already caught a lot of flak.”

“It’s part of the DNA of being an Israeli artist,” added Patir. “It really puts art in its place for me in a way in which reality trumps everything.”