Exhibition Opening – HUGS

Ruti Sela, Hugs, solo exhibition.

Mamuta Art and Research Center, Hansen House, Jerusalem,

as part of the Jerusalem Film Festival and Manofim Festival.

Curator: Lea Mauas (sala-manca)

Opening: Thursday, 24.07.25, 19:30

In artist Ruti Sela’s new exhibition at the Maamuta Art Center, four works are presented that explore the body, interpersonal relationships, and technology. The central work, Hugs 2025, is a recreation of her first video piece, Hugs (1999), a performance piece filmed on the streets of Jerusalem with the aim of collecting hugs from strangers. The entire exhibition gestures at the changes that have taken place over the past 25 years—from technological developments to shifts in values and ethics—and examines the demographic and political transformations in Israeli society and in Jerusalem over the past quarter century.

The exhibition also features three earlier video works:

Hugs (1999), the original video work, 9:00 minutes (silent).

Hugs #2 (2017), a 1:30-minute video documenting a kindergarten teacher at a birthday party inviting children to kiss and hug the birthday boy—who happens to be the artist’s son. The video raises questions about education, power, and vulnerability—of both the child being filmed and the artist, who, as a parent, documents a ritualistic event in the kindergarten setting.

Therms and Conditions (2022), 1:32 minutes, created in collaboration with Maayan Amir. This video was filmed through the thermal scope of a weapon (Infrared Thermography), in an attempt to document human heat traces generated by rubbing strangers’ hands on the bodies of the artists during a cold winter night in 2022, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The work addresses the tension between the desire for human closeness and the distancing, dehumanizing gaze of a weapon’s scope, which blurs the identities of its filmed subjects.

Ruti Sela, born December 1974 in Jerusalem, is an artist living and working in Tel Aviv. Her work lies at the intersection of cinema, performance, and video art. Sela documents and investigates different systems of power relations, often in the context of law, politics, and sexuality. Her work has been exhibited at numerous exhibitions and festivals in Israel and internationally, including: the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Bat Yam Museum, The Center for Digital Art in Holon, the Istanbul Biennial, Berlin Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Manifesta, and institutions such as the Jeu de Paume and Centre Pompidou in Paris, ZKM Museum in Germany, MUMOK in Vienna, Tate Modern in London, and the Stedelijk Bureau in Amsterdam.

She has received several awards, including the Anselm Kiefer Prize from the Wolf Foundation, the Young Artist Award, the Encouragement of Creativity Award, and the Senior Video Artist Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture.