Motherland

Motherland is a new book by Ruth Patir which accompanies her similarly titled exhibition, opening this April at the 2024 Venice Biennale of Art. The book brings together texts by curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, Noam Gal, Keren Goldberg, and a conversation between the artist and Eva Illouz, interspersed with visual sequences from the animated films that make up the installation.

While the book presents a broad survey of the artists body of 3D animated films and installations, it highlights her latest project Motherland—a multi-part video installation documenting her egg-freezing odyssey, conceived here as a 3D animation where she re-casts herself as an ancient archeological ‘fertility figurine’, Using motion capture technologies and documentation from her cell phone to free these relics from their ideological shackles.

Ruth Patir (b. 1984; lives and works in Tel Aviv) is a new media artist who integrates documentary storytelling with computer-generated imagery. Her work is often grounded in her biography, gradually opening up to address larger societal issues, such as the politics of gender, technology, and the hidden mechanisms of power.