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Ori Gersht
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Blow Up, 2007
These large-scale photographs, entitled "Blow Up", depict elaborate floral arrangements, based upon a 19th Century still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, captured in the moment of exploding. This visual occurrence, that is too fast for the human eye to process and can only be perceived with the aid of photography, is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’.
Big Bang and Time After Time: exploding flowers and other matters, 2006
‘Big Bang’ is a film that at first sight appears to be a Dutch flowers still life painting. However, the illusion shutters suddenly as the flowers and the vase explode to the intensive sound of war sirens, which are slowly transformed into a high pitch mechanical voice. The explosion erupts the scene, which subsequently transforms into a silent, slow moving cosmic downpour of colourful flower particles and dust. In relation to the film Gersht developed a photographic series titled "Time after time: exploding flowers and other matters" that negotiates art history in relation to contemporary means of image production. The photographs depict still life flower paintings at the very moment of explosion suspended between life and death. Such violently frozen spectacles were inconceivable during Renaissance times and only became visible due to the employment of cutting edge technologies that were specially customised for the making of this work.
Pomegranate, 2006
Using extremely high-speed cameras, Ori Gersht has recreated in the film ‘Pomegranate’ a Renaissance like still life composition. Whereas such paintings attempted to preserve motionless moments frozen in time, Gersht’s compositions are obstructed by fast and violent intervention. In ‘Pomegranate’, a film that references Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 17th century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion and obliterates a suspended pomegranate, bursts it into open and wheels it slowly in the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying seeds. This peaceful image transform into blood shade. In doing so the film establishes a dialogue between stillness and motion, peace and violence.
The Clearing, 2005
"Liquidation", a series of photographs, was created in the course of a journey into the past, the lost past, the past that once was so tangible and real, the past that evaporated and disappeared. This journey back to the southwest region of the Ukraine was a journey into the darkest times, the time of Nazi occupation and the brutal elimination of the entire Jewish community. The landscape is there, unchanged, the villages are there as ever before, but simultaneously all has gone, evaporated from the surface.
Ghost, traces but mainly voids.
"The Forest", a 13' film shot in the forests of Galicia, is photographic in nature, it delivers images, sensual experiences.It is not the story, but the primal sense of a major disaster that suddenly occurs and is almost immediately forgotten; life goes on and the tranquil ambience quickly restors itself. Concrete and loud, trees are crashing in the romantic forest. They fall without a clear reason or an apparent cause. In memory of what is already lost.
Ghost and Blaze, 2003 - 2004
‘Ghost’ was photographed in ancient olive plantations in the region of Galilee in Israel. Each photograph is a representation of a single tree, investigated in its own and detailed individuality. These iconic images are both portraits of trees and an account of time in which history is conceived. These images are an attempt to create a subtle tension between formal beauty and political violence.
‘Blaze’, depicts the tormented territories of the Israeli landscape. These burnt and distorted landscapes escape the specificity of place or time. Instead they are attempting to capture the primordial essence of the land and in doing so to create a dialogue between temporal events and timelessness.
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Works from TA Museaum and Tate Britan art-now
Being There
Desert, Israel 2001
For the last 3000 years the Judean desert has been a subject to political conflicts, wars
and atrocities. Since biblical times it offered a shelter for prophets and political refugees. In our time this desert is
operating as a dividing front between Israel and the West bank. This series of images is exploring the gaps between
what we know and what is, the gaps between mythical notion of a place at its tangible geography. The anonymous
voids which are depicted in the images are questioning the validity of mythical sentiment and historical claims.
Knowledge Factory
UK 1999-2001
During the blitz of the Second World War many schools in Britain were demolished.
At the end of the war the British government had to find an immediate solution. In the years that followed many schools
were quickly built, in one journal they were described as the knowledge factories. The school program was one of the rare
attempts of British architecture to come to terms with Modernism, however this attempt was not an ideological one but a
pragmatic solution to an urgent problem. Originally the schools were suppose to provide a temporary solution, but they have
kept on functioning ever since.
Mass Culture
2000-...
A series of panoramic images which were created with a 360 degrees rotating camera.
The images reveal the grand architecture and manifest the long lasting preoccupation of
Western civilization with the architectural construct of the coliseum.
Stadiums are ritualistic shrines, places for pilgrimage, for masses to come together, to unify and identify with a
common ideal and through it with each other. It is this unifying experience that makes the project so relevant to the
current European political climate.
White Noise
Poland 1999
The images are result of a photographic search of the lost past.
The images were produced during a journey between Auschwitz and Belzec.
The journey was based on Martin Gilbert's book, 'The Holocaust Journey'.
In the book Gilbert and a group of students travelled through Eastern Europe Their
journey was guided by the relics and traces of the lost Jewish past. Gilbert's insightful account
allowed me to dig below the surfaces, to extract and identify silent witnesses, to attach the still
standing trees and walls to specific events. At all time, I was aware to the photographic impossibility of
the subject; how can I describe the indescribable, or as Theodor Adorno once put it; how can anyone write
lyric poetry after Auschwitz?
I resolved the paradox with white monochromes, non-descriptive silences, images of burned soil covered by
virginal snow. While travelling on trains, I looked through the windows, taking pictures of the passing time.
Examining at the exact landscape, attempting to grasp the tangible but always submitting to fleeting moments.
Afterwars
Bosnia 1998
The photographs in 'Afterwars' were taken in and around Sarajevo in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.
The subject is the apartment blocks that bare the scars of war, but also the location of growth and renewal of life.
At first sight the images appear formalistic, making reference to modernist grid paintings, but on closer examination the
images reveal a tension between appearance and reality. The images of 'Afterwars' are not moralistic, they do not mourn the
devastation of atrocious deeds, they do not commemorate the lost past of Bosnia. The images are an observation of life,
the force that pulls through, the force that moves on and regenerates and the optimism that is attributed to renewal and
continuation.
Rear window
Vauxhall, London 1997-99
Avoiding detailed description the images offer an account of space. Although taken in London the places are almost unrecognizable, universal. This series of images was taken from my rear window, over a period of two years, the images document London without describing it, they are concentrating on a long deserted part of the city, on the unobtained space that is hovering above the familiar surface. Despite the formal association with abstract expressionist and minimalist paintings these images are constituted in reality, small clues and evidence direct and orientated the viewers, providing them with a reassuring sense of familiar gravity. The series call into question our familiarity with our own natural habitat, pointing out the gulf between the sky that we believe we know and that of the photographs, a gap between the mechanical, attentive and unassumptive vision of the camera, and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye.
All the images were taken through the same window at different times of the year and at different times of day. The images were shot in a naturalistic mood, no filter or other optical devices were applied, and the saturated colours are a results of cloud formations and light accumulation. The clouds traps the light that emanate from the buzzing city underneath and in return the light of the city tint the clouds with its bright and luminance colours.
The images provide an account of the intensive activity that is taking place on the ground, exposing the radiation of energy into space, this interaction between the light of below and the light of above expose the intricate relationships between culture and nature.
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