LUCERNE.- The films of Guy Ben Ner (*1969) are homemade in a dual sense, in terms of their aesthetic and of their setting. His family’s apartment repeatedly serves as the film location and the films feature his wife and children. For example, he transforms their kitchen into a ship or a rabbit hutch. Filming and the family’s everyday life intermingle and mutually influence each other. In Moby Dick (2000) Guy Ben Ner, in the role of the one-legged Captain Ahab, stands on the kitchen worktop beside the water dispenser, jumps out of the fridge or has a plate slide over and back between himself and his daughter in keeping with the swell of waves. Here the artist combines Herman Melville’s literary classic with a homage to the silent movie era’s delight in improvisation.

Technically speaking, Guy Ben Ner’s films resemble amateur videos. As this artist does not aim to create a cinematic illusion of reality, he likes to expose how the film is made. However, Guy Ben Ner assembles his videos according to all the rules of cinema: shot and reverse shot, flash insert, outside view, inside view. It is easy to recognise the cinema-adept storyteller in the way the artist drives the narrative, subdividing it into short entertaining sequences. Guy Ben Ner’s “homemade” aesthetic indicates that we can all do something. Family obligations or unconducive circumstance are no reason for doing nothing. Our projects, activities, actions need not be postponed. No professional equipment is required, no huge studio, no large team. If we want to, we can start at home, right at the heart of our current situation in life.

Guy Ben Ner explores the borders between public and private space in his videos. For Stealing Beauty (2007) he lodged himself and his family in several branches of a furniture chain to film a sitcom. In Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2022) the artist took down the letters of global company logos and removed cobblestones from a square so that the sentence “Go Back Where U Came From” emerges. In Foreign Names (2012) Guy Ben Ner uses everyday processes to convey political messages.
Guy Ben Ner’s markedly anarchistic sense of humour is evident in many of his works. In I’d Give It to You if I Could but I Borrowed It (2007) he and his children Elia and Amir discover, in the LWL- Museum für Kunst und Kultur, those icons of 20th century art that revolve around the bicycle.

Without further ado, the three of them build a bicycle out of sculptures by Tinguely, Picasso and Duchamp and ride around Lake Aa on it. The audience can join in the fun. Not only can the film be got going on a hometrainer, it can also be made to run backwards and forwards, and the video speed can be controlled.

In 2005 Guy Ben Ner developed the Treehouse Kit for the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2007 he had a work shown in the Sculpture Projects in Münster. We’ve Lost is Guy Ben Ner’s first museum exhibition in Switzerland and brings together video works and sculptures of the past two decades.

Curated by Fanni Fetzer