Adi Sela

You Don’t Choose Your Family

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina
Through the relationships formed within my own family unit, my work wishes to delineate the conventional and traditional power relations that construct the family hierarchy and its relevance as a universal cultural structure.
The exhibition consists of a group of video works created in collaboration with my family over a year. In each video, I asked them to perform unusual actions in front of the camera. The instructions I devised for them draw on a range of sources: in some, there is an attempt at recreating personal childhood memories, some are based on routine everyday activities in the family life, and others are influenced by the history of art, video, and performance.
The action’s duration and monotony uncover its absurdity, introducing questions about intimacy, control, and boundaries