Ruth Patir
Bio: Ruth Patir works with film, performance/ action, and writing. Patir locates the hidden quality of subjectivities within the sharing and re-telling of stories.
She graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem 2011 (BFA), and has been showing in various venues including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA, 2014), The Petach Tikva Museum of Modern Art, Kav-16 Community Gallery for Contemporary Art (2012, 2013). Collaboratively, Patir has also founded and taken part in several art spaces including “Mazeh 9” and other participatory art spaces in Tel-Aviv-Yafo.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
Please write about your work.
In this new work, I engage the subject of cliché that surrounds dreams, reevaluate it, and place it in new focus. It began with a dream I had about President Barack Obama, a story I began retelling until the image of our meeting transformed from fiction to fact. Realizing the power of this retelling, the work expanded into a documentary voyage, wearing many forms and concluded at a ceramicist’s wheel with a presidential look-a-like.
I took the role of the documentarist, capturing the evasive qualities of the dream narrative and celebrating the agency each dreamer possesses within her own story. In doing so, the work illustrates the dream as a site of political intervention.
Our sense of time is post-traumatic, suspended in the continuous present of dreams. This work demonstrates the lack of ability to differentiate between past, present, and future in both dream world and within our contemporary society. Its documentary character emphasizes the hidden quality of subjectivities within the sharing and re-telling of stories.
Lauren Lawrence, the celebrity dream interpreter I work with writes in her bookDream Keys for the Future that even “the ordinary dream may be considered as a possible vehicle of prophecy.” Lawrence elaborates that the narrative of dreams can be a universal key connecting us with our unconscious by access- ing an otherwise unreachable plane, realm of perception, or experience. It is from this unconscious realm that collective, universal remembrances emerge.
“Confronting scientific reasoning, the majority of paranormal
experiences or phenomena, such as prophesy, clairvoyance, astral projection, and ESP, remain either unverifiable, inconsistent, or unexplainable – and at best, in the realm of the hypothetical.
Prophetic dreams, however, in that they come packaged in narrative
form, may for the most part be interpreted and understood in
conventional psychoanalytic terms. But after everything is dreamt
and discussed, even the ordinary dream may be considered as a
possible vehicle of prophesya universal key that connects us
with our unconscious by accessing an otherwise unreachable
plane, realm of perception, or experience. For it is from this
unconscious realm that collective, universal remembrances emerge.
Universal remembrance is very different from individual remembrance.
To be sure, whereas an individual remembrance is concerned with
one’s exclusive, personal, private past preserved in unconsciousness,
the universal remembrance is concerned with the Jungian collective unconscious: one’s shared, impersonal, world memory, in which
lies the accretion of knowledge of past events.
While it is certain that our unconscious contains the past,
it is entirely a matter of conjecture whether it contains future
as well. As a dream, and particularly the uncurious, in non linear,
it has neither temporal knowledge of past or present nor knowledge
of spatial boundaries, because there is no contrast or distinction
of time. This characteristic allows the opposite sides of the
spectrum, past and future, to chase each other’s tail such that
the future appears in the past and the past appears in the future.
If time is not significant to the unconscious mind, why are
prophetic dreams difficult to believe, understand, or accept?
If we can conceptualize Einstein’s view of the circularity of time,
we can conceptualize an oxymoron: the previous future.“