Alumnus Ben Hagari '14 Debuts New Work Across Multiple Exhibitions
Visual Arts alumnus Ben Hagari ’14 will have his work exhibited by Fundación CALOSA in Mexico as part of a new solo show.
The exhibition not only marks Hagari’s first presentation of his work in Mexico, but it is also the debut of his new installation, The Back Side. As noted by curator Omar López-Chahoud in the exhibition notes, The Back Side is “a multimedia video installation, featuring a protagonist whose face has been erased from facial features. Different scenarios portray a mundane existence in a world whose marks have been removed. Constantly turning his back to the camera, this isolated figure transformed the home into a theatrical stage, where he interacts with objects turned ‘animated’ by their proximity to the faceless head. There’s a constant desire to communicate non verbally and find expression in the absence of a gaze, through props, sounds and play. A defamiliarizing effect is created through conceptual and material interventions: make-up and props are manipulated to construct an erased existence and turn the real into artificial. The work generates a binary structure: backward and forward, front and rear, serious and funny.”
The exhibition is on display now through December 2021 at Fundación CALOSA. In addition to his solo show in Mexico, Hagari is also featured in two exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
Hagari’s “Potter’s Will” (2015) is one of the pieces featured in the Rose Art Museum’s current exhibition, Universal Remote. The show, which is only open to Brandeis students, faculty, and staff at this time, will run through August 29, 2021. The exhibition explores how themes such as social relationships, psychological turmoil, and spirituality have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Hagari’s piece is currently on display at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies on the Brandeis campus.
'The Back Side' by Ben Hagari '14
'Potter’s Will' (2015) by Ben Hagari '14
Desktop is a special online project presented by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Like many other institutions across the globe, the museum was forced to temporarily close to the public due to the pandemic. Thus came the idea of Desktop—an online exhibition of short videos commissioned from multiple artists that “would reveal where their art evolves: the desktop.”
As noted on the project’s webpage, “the title [Desktop] refers both to the participating artists’ physical desktop and their digital one—an explicit reference to the nature of the computer-screen image, at a time when the mutual relationship between the physical and virtual dimensions has been brought to the fore.”
You can watch Hagari’s contribution to the exhibition, the short film hmm, on the project webpage.
In addition to his exhibitions at Tel Aviv and the Rose Art Museum, Hagari was also recently featured in The Musical Brain, presented by High Line Art. The program, which concluded June 23, 2021, was a video exhibition that explored not only how music is an essential art form, but also a way we hear and interpret the world around us. Hagari’s “Fresh” (2014) was among the videos that made up The Musical Brain’s video program. The film is a humorous portrait of a man made entirely from vegetables, and who is eventually harvested to be carved into musical instruments.
While The Musical Brain installation at the High Line has since closed, “Fresh” is currently on view at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem as part of the exhibition, Bodyscapes. Curated by Dr. Adina Kamien, the exhibition studies the concept of embodiment and the corpus as an organizing structure through examining the relationship between nature and culture through the prism of the body. The exhibition will run though July 10th, 2021. Watch the virtual tour through the exhibition space here.
Ben Hagari is an Israeli-born, NY-based artist whose films and video installations are tragicomedies that unfold in absurdist environments. Extending from the screen-based to installation format and printed matter, his work is the result of wide-ranging research in the fields of literature, theater, art history, and scientific curiosities. Hagari has shown in the US and abroad including at The Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts, the SculptureCenter in New York as part of their In Practice survey of contemporary sculpture, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, KIT in Düsseldorf, Flora Ars+Natura in Bogotá, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art and The Israel Museum, among others. He has taught classes at both Columbia University School of the Arts and Yale University’s School of Art.
