Subheadline:
Ancient figurines, digital animation, personal testimony, and questions of motherhood converge as Ruth Patir’s acclaimed work makes its U.S. premiere at The Jewish Museum.
Discover Hook:
What can an ancient figurine tell us about a woman living in the digital age?
For Ruth Patir, the answer begins with fragments.
Ancient female figurines dating to roughly 800–600 BCE become animated digital characters in (M)otherland, a five-part multimedia work that moves between archaeology, autobiography, technology, motherhood, and the politics surrounding reproduction. Originally created for the Israel Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the work will make its U.S. premiere at The Jewish Museum in New York on December 18, 2026, where it will remain on view through June 7, 2027.
Patir’s project occupies an unusual space between ancient history and contemporary digital culture. Its archaeological references are thousands of years old, while its visual language belongs unmistakably to the present: computer-generated imagery, recorded conversations, animation, sound, and digitally constructed avatars.
The result is a work about how stories survive—and how they are rewritten.
Ancient Objects, New Bodies
At the center of (M)otherland are female figurines from the Iron Age, based on archaeological objects dating approximately to 800–600 BCE. Their original purpose and meaning remain uncertain, although they have often been interpreted as fertility-related objects.
Patir transforms these ambiguous archaeological forms into animated figures.
They become avatars through which the artist considers her own experiences and those of women around her. Rather than treating the archaeological objects as fixed historical evidence, she gives them new lives inside a contemporary narrative.
That transformation is central to the work.
The figurines are fragments from a distant past, but their questions remain recognizable: the body, reproduction, motherhood, vulnerability, social expectations, and the meaning assigned to women’s bodies.
Digital technology becomes the mechanism that connects those distant worlds.
A Personal Story Becomes a Larger Question
The original four videos—Petah Tikva (Waiting), Intake, Retrieval Stories, and (M)otherland—draw on Patir’s experience following a diagnosis involving a gene mutation and her subsequent experience with fertility treatment. The videos incorporate recorded conversations involving the artist, doctors, her mother, friends, and an imagined online audience.
The personal material gives the project its emotional center.
Patir examines the uncertainty surrounding motherhood while navigating a medical system and the expectations placed on reproduction.
The Jewish Museum describes the work as exploring bodily autonomy, medicalization, and state intervention, particularly in relation to Israel’s state-funded IVF system.
These themes make (M)otherland more than a meditation on ancient artifacts. The archaeological figures become a visual vocabulary for discussing contemporary experiences that are simultaneously intimate and socially structured.
The Meaning of “Motherland”
The title itself carries multiple associations.
The term (M)otherland brings together “mother” and “land,” suggesting an overlap between motherhood, homeland, belonging, and territory.
The Venice Biennale described Patir’s work as confronting questions about motherhood and reproduction through her own lived experience, while using the ancient figurines as avatars for that journey.
The title therefore operates on both personal and collective levels.
Motherhood can be understood as an intimate experience, but it can also become part of larger cultural narratives about family, population, gender, identity, and national belonging.
Patir’s work does not separate those layers. Instead, it places them inside the same digital landscape.
From Archaeology to the Digital Screen
The phrase “Digital Antiquity” provides an especially useful lens for understanding the exhibition.
Patir is not simply digitizing archaeological objects.
She is changing their function.
The figurines originally existed as physical objects whose meanings are uncertain. In (M)otherland, they become animated bodies capable of moving, speaking through recorded narratives, and participating in an autobiographical story.
This creates a productive tension between evidence and interpretation.
Archaeology often asks viewers to reconstruct meaning from fragments. Digital animation can do the opposite: it can invent movement and personality for objects that no longer possess either.
The technology therefore becomes part of the historical question.
What happens when contemporary tools give ancient objects a new voice?
Five Videos, Five Layers of Experience
The work’s original four videos document Patir’s personal experience with diagnosis and fertility treatment. The fifth, Keening, was created after October 7, 2023, and shifts the work toward collective mourning and rage.
In Keening, the same digitally animated figures appear alongside thousands of fragments held in museum storage.
The Jewish Museum describes the fragments and figurines coming together in a processional movement, turning the installation toward collective grief and women’s communal power.
This addition changes the scale of the project.
The earlier videos are closely connected to individual experience; Keening expands the emotional field toward collective experience following the events of October 7.
The work consequently moves between the body and the archive, between personal testimony and historical memory.
Venice, Closure, and the Politics of Presentation
(M)otherland was originally commissioned for the Israel Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
The pavilion did not open to the public as originally planned. According to The Jewish Museum, Patir and curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit decided shortly before the Biennale opening to keep the presentation closed until a ceasefire was reached in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and a hostage-release agreement was reached.
The Biennale’s official listing identifies Patir as the exhibitor, with Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit as curators.
That history is part of the work’s exhibition context, but it is important to distinguish the documented circumstances from interpretations of its political meaning.
Patir’s work itself engages questions of reproduction, gender, personal autonomy, collective grief, and the ways individual lives are affected by wider political and cultural forces. The Jewish Museum has described the acquisition as part of its commitment to contemporary art that engages with issues of its time.
The Jewish Museum’s Digital Turn
The New York presentation also fits within The Jewish Museum’s broader rethinking of how historical and contemporary material can coexist.
The museum’s renewed collection installation, Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum, brings more than 200 works together across a thematic and chronological framework spanning thousands of years of Jewish cultural history.
Within that environment, (M)otherland creates an especially direct encounter between antiquity and contemporary technology.
Ancient artifacts become references for digital bodies.
Personal testimony enters a museum traditionally associated with historical collections.
And contemporary questions about gender and reproduction are placed alongside objects whose original meanings have themselves been debated and reconstructed.
From Artifact to Avatar
Patir’s practice is grounded in new media and combines documentary storytelling with computer-generated imagery. The Jewish Museum notes that her work often begins with autobiography before expanding toward larger questions involving gender, technology, and hidden mechanisms of power.
That trajectory is visible throughout (M)otherland.
The work begins with the artist’s body and experience, moves through medical technology and reproductive systems, reaches backward toward archaeology, and then expands again into collective memory.
Its digital figures are therefore neither purely historical nor purely fictional.
They are reconstructed presences.
A New York Encounter With an Unfinished Past
The significance of (M)otherland at The Jewish Museum lies partly in this refusal to keep history still.
The ancient figurines remain fragments, but Patir’s animation gives them motion.
The medical experience is personal, but the work places it within larger social structures.
The digital imagery is contemporary, but its visual subjects are thousands of years old.
And the museum itself becomes another layer in the conversation—a place where objects, memories, identities, and technologies are continually given new contexts.
For New York audiences, the exhibition offers an encounter with an artist using digital tools not simply to create futuristic imagery, but to reconsider how the past continues to inhabit contemporary life.
Ruth Patir: (M)otherland opens at **The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, on December 18, 2026, and runs through June 7, 2027. The presentation marks the work’s U.S. premiere.
