Floating Petals – Japan 2010

For many centuries cherry blossoms were, and still are, highly significant in Japanese culture. The rich and complex meanings of these blossoms constitute a matrix of interrelated concepts, associated with renewal, the celebration of life and good fortune, but also predicated by the ephemeral nature of life, death and rebirth.

In other words, the symbol stands for process and relationships, not an isolated concept. In the 19th century, with the beginning of the Meiji era, when Japan begun its modernisation, militarization and colonial expansion, the symbolic meaning of the cherry blossoms was re-appropriated for nationalistic and military purposes. It is precisely because cherry blossoms stand for life, predicated by death and rebirth, that the Japanese military were able to tip the scales and exploit their symbolism in terms of death instead of life. For the imperial state, the virtue of cherry blossoms was not the life force represented by the petals as a full flower, but was instead the premature fall of the virginal petals as symbols of the sacrifice made by the young soldiers, since to die without clinging to life was a concept later introduced by the state to convince Kamikaze soldiers to plunge into death.

The symbolism of the cherry blossoms was transformed from full blooms as a life force to individual falling petals as a representation of the sacrifice of soldiers and their subsequent rebirth. The work that I produced in Japan between April and May 2010 meditates on the life and death dialectics that are symbolically imbedded in the life cycle of the cherry blossom. In the course of my journey I was moving between the cities of Tokyo and Hiroshima, both of which were damaged during World War II, and ancient locations and temples in the remote regions of west Japan. This geographical dichotomy allowed me to develop a visual dialectic between the historic and modern symbolism of the cherry blossom. The trees that I photographed in Hiroshima and Tokyo were all planted after the war.

In post A Bomb Hiroshima they are all fed from the nuclear contaminated soil, while in Tokyo they are often associated with death and nationalism, located in Kamikaze memorial shrines and around the imperial palace. In contrast, the trees that were photographed in the remote regions are ancient and were not affected by the war. These trees are often located in the vicinity of Buddhist temples and are associated with the force of life.

The artist is showing photographs from two bodies of work made in 2008 and 2009, Hide and Seek and Evaders.

Hide and Seek

As in previous series, Gersht’s depictions of landscape address ideas about memory, history and identity. They are images of places or journeys that are simultaneously physical and metaphysical, partly real and partly mythological. Photography’s claim to truth is questioned and rather than being presented with the depiction of a specific moment in time, the viewer is left instead with images that are suggestive of something that happened in the past, or might happen in the future.

The photographs in the series Hide and Seek depict hidden swamps and marshes located in the remnants, on the borders of Poland and Belarus, of the vast primeval forests that once covered most of Europe.

Gersht was seeking locations that at times of political conflict, during the Second World War, had become places of refuge for partisan communities.

Hide and Seek attempts to explore the dialectic between metaphysical and real places. Photography can only depict the reality that is physically present in front of the lens, and Gersht was interested in finding places to photograph that do not, or did not exist on the map and that therefore may be referred to as ‘nonplaces’ or voids. In doing so he attempted to take the photographs out side of the physical confinements of a place or a time and to relocate them in a subjective psychological space. This journey in search of the remote and historical hides was realized in a series of images that attempt to depict absence.

In these large-scale panoramas the horizon line is often dissolved and the special perspective is compressed, this visual approach enabled Gersht to unify the spaces and blur the distinction between reality and its reflection causing the images to liquefy and reappear like a mirage out of fragile stained colours.

In conjunction Gersht also took photographs in the vicinity of Sobibor forest where the sobibor death camp once sited and quickly replace by trees, whose routes thrived on the ashes below the surface. The photographs were taken through net curtains that traditionally are used by the local villagers to delineate public and private space. In doing so Gersht diminished the perspective and created the illusion of the lace and the landscape melting into one another while disguising and revealing each other.

Evaders

The long panoramic images in Evaders were photographed in the Pyrenees along the Lister Route, on the border between France and Spain. This route is symbolic as a place of transition, suspended between past and future. It has a long history of smuggling, economically motivated migration and the search for refuge from political or religious persecution. During World War II many used this route to escape Nazi occupied France. One of these was the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide after he found the border closed on the day he attempted to cross it in September 1940. Benjamin’s failed escape has become tagged with a prophetic forecast of the impending cataclysm in Europe.

The clear visual references to German Romanticism in Gersht’s photographs, particularly to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, are suggestive of a fatal attachment to German culture that prevented Benjamin, like many others, from grasping the horrific scope of the Nazi agenda until it was too late to escape its consequences. Since the introduction of the Single European Act, the physical borders are no longer there, but Gersht’s work raises questions about the continued existence of cultural and psychological borders.

Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv in 1967 and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited internationally since 1999, including solo exhibitions at the Art Now room at Tate Britain (2002) the Tel Aviv Museum (2002), The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2005/06,) the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2008) and in the Black Box at the Hirshhorn Museum Washington (2009). He lives and works in London

The exhibition Folding Time will present for the first time the still life film trilogy titled ‘Pomegranate’ 2006, ‘Big Bang’ 2006 and ‘Falling bird’ 2008 alongside the photographic works from a series titled Blow-Up 2007.

In this body of work, Gersht explores relationships between photography, film and technology, revisiting fundamental philosophical conundrums concerning optical perception, conception of time and the relationships between the photographic image and objective reality.

All three films were shot with high definition, high speed camera technology and are based on old masters still life compositions. Whereas such paintings attempted to preserve motionless moments frozen in time, Gersht’s compositions are obstructed by fast and violent interventions. In ‘Pomegranate’, a film that references Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 17th century still life and Harold Edgerton’s high speed 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.

The peaceful image transforms into bloodshed. In ‘Big Bang’, a Dutch flowers still life painting suddenly explodes to the intensive sound of war sirens. The explosion disrupts the scene, which subsequently transforms into a silent, slow moving cosmic downpour of colorful flowers, particles and dust. In ‘Falling Bird’, a film based on Chardin’s still life, a hanging pheasant is suddenly unlashed of its string, free falling toward a mirror like black surface, collapsing into its own reflection, on impact the bird penetrate the liquid surface and in doing so triggers an epic chain reaction, reminiscent of a geological disaster.

In relation to the film trilogy Gersht developed a group of large-scale photographs entitled Blow Up. These depict elaborate floral arrangements, based upon a 19th Century still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, captured in the moment of exploding. Gersht´s compositions are literally frozen in motion, a process dependent on the ability of the advanced technology of photography to freeze-frame action, something inconceivable to the Old Masters. 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’.

Gersht´s films and photographs allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over old master still life and vanitas paintings. However, technology has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions, bringing the concerns of still life masters into a contemporary context. By basing his films and photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical tradition, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of his work which closely resembles these iconic masterpieces. Yet they are distanced due to the instantaneous digital process which translate every second in reality to a minute on film in the case of the moving image pieces and in the photographs, captures each shattering still life at a speed of 1/3200 of a second and stores the information immaterially as data on a hardrive until each is transcoded into a film or fabricated as a C-Type print, returning the image to the world of two-dimensional artworks.

Throughout this exhibition peacefully balanced compositions become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.