(2004) is a seven-minute video showing a person struggling out of a swampy lake through a forest and carrying a heavy human-beast hybrid. Each step is painstaking as the viewer struggles to make sense of what is happening."} 5f:{"position":3,"content":"“It is a love story, but some love stories are very disturbing,” says Ratman in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post from New York City, where he lives when he’s not in Tel Aviv. “I guess I am going for the disturbing.”"} 60:{"position":4,"content":"The 36-year-old Bezalel graduate succeeds if viewers feel their understanding of the world collapse when they watch his films."} 61:{"position":5,"content":"“The box of tools that you think you have to do something is no longer fixed and then you have to rearrange things,” he says."} 62:{"position":6,"content":"Ratman doesn’t stop at subverting and undermining the viewer. He wants the the audience to then create their own unexpected meaning out of the chaos."} 63:{"position":7,"content":"“My big call is to make this discomfort or this confusion or misunderstanding something positive, not as something that the viewer will think ‘I’m stupid, I can’t understand,’ but more like, ‘wow, I don’t understand it but I want to, and I can create something out of it.’” Ratman says that for the Biennale he’s working on a multi-video installation that will “tell the story of a small community on a long journey that ends up with a big surprise.”"} 64:{"position":8,"content":"In disorienting fashion, he cannot divulge any more details. While he is excited and honored to present, he says he’s also quite nervous."} 65:{"position":9,"content":"“It’s a bit stressing because I feel that everybody’s looking to see what will be, what will I do.”"} 66:{"position":10,"content":"There isn’t any reason a critic would label Ratman’s work as “Israeli” or “Jewish,” but he says his sources of inspiration are naturally embedded in his

The borders of humanity

Gilad Ratman, representing Israel at 2013 Venice Biennale, presents disorienting films of human-beast hybrids.