Last weekend MASS MoCA unveiled Guy Ben-Ner's solo exhibition "Thursday the 12th" as part of the pioneering western Massachusetts museum complex's 10th anniversary celebration. Consisting mainly of videos, the show provides a gripping overview of the Israel-born artist's unconventional career.

As a student, Ben-Ner moved his studio practice to his home, and many of his works, such as Moby Dick, feature fantasy play with his family. In an unpublished interview with artist Boaz Arad, Ben-Ner said “I had to choose between being a bad father away from home a lot, and being a good father, staying at home and making concessions. To work at home is a type of compromise.” Themes of exile--of being on an island in the home--recur in other works, including Treehouse Kit (2005), in which the artist uses ordinary bedroom furniture kits to build a tree and other tropical accouterments. While the artist’s family has been on view in his work for years, the 2007 video Stealing Beauty brought their domestic life into a busy IKEA showroom. In this video the Ben-Ner clan, without permission, enacts home scenes in IKEA’s domestic vignettes (showering, sleeping, and bickering). With a humorous nod to their surroundings, father and children discuss the nature of private property and service-based commercial enterprise with a Marx/Engels slant. Pointing to the surrounding showroom as legitimate shoppers pass through the frame, Ben-Ner says, “This house belongs to us. We are the only ones who have the right to use it and the right to exclude others from using it…. Private property creates borders, son.”

The exhibition's title refers to the day preceding Friday the 13th, a day that anticipates a foreboding tomorrow. Similarly, the works on view in this exhibition take on a new aura of foreshadowing in light of the newest development in Ben-Ner’s private life, which is his divorce. That experience is explored in the newest work on view, a video commissioned by MASS MoCA, titled If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate. In this video, the artist and MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson (who is also a pilot) travel by plane, car, and tandem bicycle in a circuitous tour, with circuitous conversation, punctuated by vehicular crashes. In the scene pictured above, Thompson and Ben-Ner sit in the rubble of their plane crash (produced by MoCA’s resourceful staff with patched-together wrecked planes, painted to look like Thompson’s). “I climb a mountain for years and realize I’m falling down the side, I never got to be at the top,” Ben-Ner laments to Thompson shortly before the artist’s divorce settlement--thrown earlier from the plane--falls finally to the ground. The video was produced over a three-week residency at MASS MoCA, and editing was completed the very morning of the opening. (Read Thompson's account of the collaboration here.) Next to this video display an adjacent hallway features a suite of new drawings by Ben-Ner. In one, a note reads, “Guy - you are obsessive & you are not getting any younger. I am leaving you. Take care.” The note is shown, in this drawing and others, to be folded into a paper boat. One senses that Ben-Ner is pausing to reflect on this moment, but will not remain stranded in it.

A still from Guy Ben-Ner’s "Moby Dick" (2000). ; Courtesy of MASS MoCA

A still from Guy Ben-Ner's "Stealing Beauty" (2007). ; Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery