As part of the exhibition “Andy, Matthew and Ruti,” Dafna Amira will host artist Ruti Sela. They will discuss the CCA’s historical video archive—the subject of Amira’s artistic exploration in the exhibition—which Sela managed for years. What actually happened in that small office on the mysterious fifth floor of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, where the archive and the Center for Contemporary Art were born? How did the emerging video art scene in Israel operate at the turn of the millennium, and what lies between memory, reconstruction, and fantasy?

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Dafna Amira is an artist and photographer. Her works respond to existing spaces where she identifies traces, evidence, and signs of a past action. She locates cinematic qualities within them, contemplating the fluidity between reality and its performance, representation, and image. Amira draws inspiration from the fields of forensic research and criminal profiling, treating the spaces documented in her works as forensic scenes, devoid of identifiable human presence, yet bearing witness to processes or events that have taken place. In her work, the photographed spaces function as silent witnesses, accomplices to an unsolved event. Amira installs her works in exhibition spaces with reference to their architectural and conceptual characteristics, creating a mutual relationship between the photographed spaces and those in which she exhibits.

Amira is a graduate of the Criminal Profiling program at the External Studies Unit of Ariel University; holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Tel Aviv ; and graduated with honors from the Department of Photography at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem.. Her works have won several awards, including the Lucy Rozenbaum Foundation for Contemporary Photography Award, Rami Halperin Photography Award, America-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship for Photography, and the Moshik Ben-Dor Award. She is currently participating in the Zumu-Lod Artists' Laboratory. Previously, she participated in the Edmond de Rothschild Center artist residency program and the A-Z West artist residency in California. Her works are included in the art collection of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and have been exhibited in prominent art spaces, including: The Center for Contemporary Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, satellite exhibition; Kfar Saba Municipal Gallery; Edmond de Rothschild Gallery; Indie Photography Gallery and more. Alongside her artistic practice, Amira is a lecturer in photography studies at Minshar College of Art.

Ruti Sela is an artist whose works are created at the intersection of cinema, performance, and video art. Sela documents and engages with various power dynamics. Her artworks have been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions and venues, including the Biennale of Sydney, the Istanbul Biennial, the Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, the New Museum Triennial, Israel Museum, Centre Pompidou, Art in General (NY), Tel Aviv Museum, Tate Modern, Jeu de Paume, ZKM, Ludwig Museum, HKW, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. 

In 2009, she initiated, together with Maayan Amir, the long-term art project Exterritory, for which they won a Young Artists Award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2011). She studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, where she graduated with distinction, and proceeded to the MFA program at the Tel Aviv University Film Department. Sela is a Senior Lecturer in the Art Department at HaMidrasha Faculty of Arts, and she is a lecturer at the Art Department, Haifa University. Throughout 2011, she was a guest resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. A book about her works titled "For the Record" was published by Archive Books in 2014. She also edited the anthology "Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds" (together with Maayan Amir, Punctum Books 2016).

The conversation will be held in Hebrew.

Duration: approx. 40 min.

Admission: included in the exhibition entry fee (20 ILS)

Image: Dafna Amira, Andy, Matthew and Ruti, 2026