Gilad Ratman’s videos and installations address the apparently untenable aspects of human behavior by exploring the need for community and by showing forms of resistance and the borders of self. Pushing narrative to its limits and allowing for a fractured chain of events to take place, the works function as a vehicle for exploring the friction between the real and the imaginary. Violating the correlation between cause and effect, Ratman’s videos undermine trust in the cinematic apparatus and open a space for the poetic and the pathetic to coexist. In some works, production and what is normally conceived as ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘the making of’ is an integral part of the work. The participants are not acting, in the sense of representation, but merely responding to a given situation, often based on physical restrictions and unfamiliar situations. A representation of Nature plays a significant role in Ratman’s work, usually serving as a ‘Petri dish’ for human interaction or a violent act. This violence, presumably, not only happens within the borders of the frame, but is also embedded in the condition of viewing and reproduced by the act of watching. Each work strives to articulate a point of view that is external and reporting in order to try and deal with the formations of identity and the borders of the ‘self’, without being subordinated to the mechanism of viewers’ identification.