Israel Pavilion show that never opened in Venice will finally have its debut

Broken ancient women march under Tel Aviv’s Begin Bridge, protesting something. One of them waves a pink flare as another captures the moment with a selfie. Up front, a headless woman pumps her missing fist into the night sky. The soundtrack is a collective wail, a cry of despair—a keen. This is Keening (2024) by the digital artist Ruth Patir, the only artwork from her solo exhibition (M)otherland that could be seen through the glass façade of the shuttered Israeli pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Keening bookends the arc of this highly visible, yet until now invisible, exhibition. It was the opening piece in Patir’s Venice pavilion and is now the concluding work of the show that is ultimately its premiere, opening this month at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Filmed just a few blocks from the museum—once the site of judicial overhaul protests, and since October 2023, the locus for protests demanding a hostage release and ceasefire deal—Patir’s shattered women marched all the way to Venice and are now back where they came from.

Returning to the source is a recurring theme of the project itself. Patir digitised a cast of around 50 Judean Pillar Figurines, palm-sized Levantine terracotta women from between 800 BC and 600 BC whose meaning and function are still an enigma. Their exaggerated breasts could mean they were fertility goddesses, or they may have had protective roles. Either way, Patir adopted one of them, a 15cm figurine, as an avatar. With her cropped hair and bangs, she really is Patir’s Iron Age doppelgänger.

That ancient figurine now opens Ruth Patir: Motherland (11 March-13 September), a multi-episode video installation using advanced image technology that is the artist’s most autobiographical work to date. “The more personal things get, the more universal they become,” Patir says of her choice to turn the camera on herself. The works comically follow Patir’s three-year process freezing her eggs as a thirtysomething woman unsure if she even wants to be a mother, after learning she carries a BRCA gene mutation that increases the likelihood of ovarian and breast cancer.

Animating ancient women while drawing on the format of 21st-century fertility treatment vlogs, Patir collapses models of femininity past and present. “A fertility figurine walks into a fertility clinic,” writes Mira Lapidot, the chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and co-curator, together with Tamar Margalit, of Patir’s exhibition, in the catalogue. The videos provide this comic scenario’s punchline.

The first works are Intake (2024), of Patir reciting her medical history, and Petach Tikva (2024), a clinical waiting room scene where bored ancient women scroll on their phones and watch television. Petach Tikva opens with one of them using Tinder and swiping right on “Ryan, 3700 BC”, an equestrian statuette whose profile says he’s “always down to try something new and go on adventures”. (She’s less into in “Marc, 5500 BC”, whose profile is mostly about his height.)

The work features an embedded television screen with an open-source video broadcasting live news to the women in the clinic—and to viewers. Petach Tikva is never experienced the same way twice. “Reality is constantly inside the show, and it’s something that the figurines consume via screen as much as we, right now, are consuming whatever’s going on outside via screen,” Patir says of her decision to include this variable.

The next gallery imitates Patir’s apartment down to her wallpaper, couch and carpet, and presents the central work in the show, (M)otherland (2024). Nearby, a niche tiled to look like Patir’s bathroom screens videos where she injects herself as part of the egg retrieval process. An adjacent room displays some figurines that Patir animated, in a drawer-style display imitating how they are stored at the Israel Antiquities Authority. They come alive again in the last gallery, which screens Keening.

If in Venice the exhibition team faced the challenge of presenting these works to international audiences during a time of war, polarisation and boycotts, in Tel Aviv, where wartime reality is inescapable, no caveats are necessary. “The square outside the museum is the sign on the door,” says Lapidot, referring to Hostages Square in the plaza alongside the museum, a gathering place for families of hostages and those supporting them since the beginning of the war. The sign Lapidot refers to is the one she, Patir and Margalit decided to post on the Israeli pavilion façade that read: “The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached.” (True to their word, they never opened the pavilion.)

“[The videos] are so intricate and they have all these nuances, and that’s what she feeds on—this messiness of life, and that life is full of contradictions,” says Margalit, curator of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. The attempt to bar Patir from exhibiting her personal works about the burdens of the female body, and instead pit her as a stand-in for the Israeli government, flattened the capacity to parse out such nuances. “Hopefully now audiences can, here.”

• Ruth Patir: Motherland, 11 March-13 September, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel