#guy ben-ner

Guy Ben Ner - Stealing Beauty I like the way that by being forced to film on different sets (IKEA Showrooms), Ben-ner is playing with continuity and in a funny way demonstrating how little it matters to the storytelling.  The Finnish work at Venice last year played with continuity in a different way, where some of the scenes were live action, some animated, and some just really basically storyboarded, but all telling the same story and jumping between them.

Guy Ben-Ner

Stealing Beauty (2007)

Guy Ben-Ner weaves a theater of the everyday in the video Stealing Beauty, revealing a slice of domestic life, family, and immigration in unexpected and serendipitous interventions that repurpose IKEA’s home displays as settings. Ben-Ner, his wife and two daughters playact loosely scripted scenarios at IKEA locations spanning Germany, Israel and the United States, dissolving the boundaries between place, the scripted and the spontaneous, and performer and audience through a language of guerilla theater. Occupying these manicured, commercial spaces—ideals of modern living—the family functions as temporary tenants, pretending in much the same way as their environment. Ben-Ner borrows from vaudeville and classic American sit-coms in these scenes, filming surreptitiously and claiming ownership over spaces intruded by confused passersby, store employees, price tags signaling changing currencies, and intercom announcements in different languages, continually sweeping the viewer into and out of the home and the store, and across national borders.