Ori Gersht - Big Bang

Ori Gersht - Big Bang I, 2006
digital video, color, sound running time: 4:23 min

Ori Gersht evokes twilight via a fusion of the sirens that sound in Israel and that he remembers from his childhood. There is the siren at dawn and dusk on Holocaust Day and Memorial Day that signals the call to remembrance; and the all-out war siren that tells citizens to take shelter in the event of an imminent attack.The sirens reach a human crescendo whose frequency shatters the on-screen still life, filling the frame with an explosion of refracted light and color before darkness descends (Victoria and Albert Museum).

(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(Filmofilia)

Ori Gersht - Pomegranate

Ori Gersht - Pomegranate, 2006, produced 2007
video, color, sound, running time: 3:52 min

Referencing a still life by 16th century Spanish artist Juan Sánchez Cotán, Ori Gersht’s eerie and painterly video features a ripe pomegranate dangling from a string and framed with other freshly harvested produce in a window. In slow motion a bullet slices through the fruit—a food symbolic of Bible, Jewish law, and Near Eastern culture—spraying blood-red seeds and flesh in the air (NY Jewish Museum).

Juan Sánchez Cotán - Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602
San Diego Museum of Art

(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(Filmofilia)

Ori Gersht - Forest

Ori Gersht - Forest, 2006
16 mm film transferred to DVD, color, sound
Running time: 13:22 min
Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?




Shot deep in the Moskolovka Forest in the Ukraine, Forest echoes the violent history of this border territory contested by Ukrainians, Poles, Russians and Germans. Ori Gersht records a series of graceful, processional pans across bands of individual trees. Gradually the eye notices a number of trees mysteriously falling, with the soundtrack amplifying the sound of each crash (MIC - Media and Interdisciplinary Art Center).



(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(Filmofilia)