Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir

Our work has been consistently concerned, in different ways, with the questions raised by the current project. Exterritory represents our sense of urgency concerning the need to produce, parallel to our artistic practice, an interdisciplinary space that goes beyond existing conventions of making and exhibiting art.

The WHW collective, which curated the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009), defined our work as: “[…] unapologetic shots of explicit dialogues and intimate contact between strangers….” Kathrin Rhomberg, the curator of the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010), wrote that: “Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir penetrate deep into the private and there discover the political. … Their work provides a striking glimpse into the interior of Israeli society. … They expose fundamental mechanisms of power.” Charles Merewether, a curator of the Sydney Biennale (2006), remarked that our work: “[…] operate[s] within a field of a laboratory, a domain where language and materials […] interrogate scientifically and imagined models of utopia [..].” And Vit Havrank curator of the Tranzit collective wrote that: “If we don’t believe a global revolution […] then we must search for and create blind spots between the borders of nation-states – and that is the ‘Exterritory’.[…]” In 2011, we received a UNESCO award honoring our “outstanding endeavors for the innovative project Exterritory.