Private View: Monday 5 June 2006, 6:30PM - 8:30PM

Exhibition Run: 7 June 2006 - Monday 17 July 2006

Curated by Tom Morton

Cubitt Gallery is proud to present `Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy’, the first European solo exhibition by young New York-based Israeli artist Tamy Ben-Tor (b. Jerusalem, 1975), and the first exhibition in curator Tom Morton’s Cubitt programme `The Fortress of Solitude’.

Ben-Tor’s funny, alarming videos and live performances are populated by fictional characters that make Sisyphean attempts to communicate certain truths (about history, about politics, about art) but instead find themselves failing and flailing in a sludgy mental space of the artist’s devising – a domain of idiocy. For these characters, saying the wrong thing, the very worst thing, is perhaps the only way to right the world.

Showing at Cubitt, Ben-Tor’s best known work, the video `Women Talk About Adolf Hitler’ (2003) features a series of women, played by the artist, who offer up absurdist diatribes about the Nazi dictator, among them a New York Jewish academic who discloses the Führer’s struggles with bad digestion, a phobia of dentists, and ugly knees – an all-too-literal take on the banality of evil, seemingly intended to prove that the devil is indeed in the most prosaic of details. Screened alongside this piece is Ben-Tor’s new video `The End of Art’ (2006), in which she casts herself as what may be a hybrid of a certain all-too-familiar artist (or, as the critic Donald Kuspit would have it, `postartist’) and the political thinker Francis Fukuyama, as though to point out that relational aesthetics and liberal triumphalism share much of the same self-satisfied cultural and political DNA. Elsewhere in the gallery, a monitor shows three portrait videos – `Alejandra’ (2005), `The Contractor’ (2005) and `The Artist in Residence’ – in which loneliness, powerlessness and self-delusion work their cruel witchcraft on a trio of lost souls.

At the opening of her Cubitt exhibition on Monday, June 5th, the artist will perform `The Dance of the Albino Rat’ accompanied by the drummer Dan Aran, at 7:45pm.

Tamy Ben-Tor has exhibited widely at venues including Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) New York, Salon 94, New York, PSI Contemporary Art Centre, New York, and The ICA, London.

`Tamy Ben-Tor: Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy’ is kindly supported by Arts Council England and The Embassy of Israel.