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Isabell Heimerdinger & Guy Ben-Ner

Dads are the stars of these two stylistically very different videos, but here the familiar cinematic image of family life is used to pose distinct questions. Nowadays working often in Beijing, Isabell Heimerdinger’s is a meticulously produced cinema, blurring the sense of where acting begins and ends, for both the audience and the actors, when the camera is present. By contrast Guy Ben-Ner employs an unmanned camera, set up in the showrooms of various IKEA stores, in order to lecture his (uncooperative) real family on economics, domesticity and authority, ultimately raising questions of territory and ownership in the global realm. In both works, the borders of the real and the fictional, the home and the studio, and the private and public, are interrupted for both audience and the videos’ participants, reflecting in ways both poignant and comic on notions of love, authority and reproduction; biological, economic, and cinematic.

Curated by Al Cameron