Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to announce an exhibition of
new work by Ori Gersht.
The exhibition will comprise photographs from two bodies of
work made in 2008 and 2009, Evaders and 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 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.
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, had become places of refuge.
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 ‘non-places’ or voids.
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.
For enquiries, please contact
Andrew Mummery at: andrew@mummeryschnelle.com
or
Wolfram Schnelle at: wolfram@mummeryschnelle.com
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