Stealing Beauty at Daadgalerie

The Daadgalerie is one of the German capital’s few non-commercial spaces showing contemporary art made in Berlin. As part of the DAAD Artist-in-Residence program, Guy Ben-Ner has written, produced, directed and starred in (along with his family) the artistic short film entitled Stealing Beauty. Fresh from the reels of the KunstFilmBiennale (Cologne,) where it was awarded the first prize, the 17-minute video is projected on the largest wall in the small premises on Zimmerstrasse, one of Berlin’s premier art gallery districts.

Shot on location, without permission in IKEA stores in Tel-Aviv, Berlin, and New York, Stealing Beauty dialogically rehashes what seems a pseudo-Hegelian philosophy of property, while delivering an indirect comment on the economy of expenditure pervasive in society today. In the various rooms of a typical European family apartment, as proposed by the veritable institution IKEA, these topics are discussed in an obviously contrived dialogue.

As the title suggests, the multifaceted work deals with the human inclination to covet (the neighbor’s wife, possessions, and property.) Yet the fact that its title is obviously taken from Bernard Bertolucci’s 1996 film and its format carries traces of the work Welcome Home, 2006 by Ulf Aminde, who in 2006 conducted interviews with shoppers in the IKEA store in Wilrijk (Belgium) lends this piece a charming moment of self-reflexive irony.

While the four members of the Ben-Ner household appear to blend in with the décor and furniture arrangements effortlessly, the incessantly changing backdrops point to an underlying instability: the struggle between the artist and the IKEA store attendants. Thus, the short “good night” scene between the artist and his wife takes place in 10 diverse beds on three different continents. Even so, what may have seemed an impracticality at the time of production, formally explodes the sense of space normally associated with the universal concept of “home.”

Since perception is in fact a function of recollection, a setting is never perceived in its entirety. Stealing Beauty, in effect, plays on this physiological curiosity and overstrains the visual apparatus and our attention span with an unmanageable bulk of backdrop information, making the 17 minute, 4 second video seem like a feature film.