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The Clearing/Liquidation: Ukraine
[2005]
Gersht often mediates between still photography and moving image
and in The Clearing he establishes a dialogue between a film
(The Forest) and a series of photographs (Liquidation).
In “The Forest”, commissioned by Film and Video
Umbrella, Gersht returns to the historical themes explored in
his previous work and experiments with the materiality of film
and sound. The disruptive crash of falling trees, which breaks
the silence of a forest idyll, creates a loud fissure in the
contemplative image presented to the viewer. The Romantic ‘silence’
of the work of artists such as Casper David Friedrich is transposed
to the forests of the Ukraine that were “chewed up by
war and fertilized by the bones and blood of the unnumbered
dead” and broken. The mediation between past and present
is given a violent jolt.
This is what Gersht felt when confronted with the beauty of
the landscapes around the Ukrainian towns of Kolomyia and Kosov
while also knowing about the terrible events that took place
there between 1941 and 1942. The need to make work out of this
confrontation resulted in the photographic series “Liquidation”.
At a time when many film and video artists who deal with political
themes are producing work that has much in common with the genre
of documentary, Gersht’s work is of another genre, that
of provocative meditation. |
The Forest
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Liquidation
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