Big Bang 01, a film created by Israeli-born, London-based photographer Ori Gersht is presently being screened on the façade of a building in Time Square, New York. It is part of the Times Square Advertising Coalition’s initiative to bring cutting edge graphic and digital art to this center of world communications. For this piece, Gersht recreated still-life compositions in the style of Old Master paintings with the aim of tracing the evolution of artistic representations of reality from the 17th century until the present.
Concurrently, Gersht also has a major solo show, his first in the UK, at the Imperial War Museum, London. Titled The Storm is What We Call Progress it features three separate works in which dark and complex themes are concealed beneath beautiful and seductive imagery.
“Will You Dance For Me?”shows an 85-year-old dancer rocking back and forth in a chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Her punishment for refusing to dance at an SS officer’s party was to stand barefoot in the snow, and she pledged that if she survived she would dedicate her life to dance. The woman featured in the video is Yehudit Arnon, founder of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and its first Artistic Director from 1970 – 1996.
The two-screen film Evaders explores the mountainous path of the Lister Route, used by many to escape Nazi-occupied France. The film focuses on the ill-fated journey of Jewish writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose own words give the exhibition its title.
The photographic work Chasing Good Fortune examines the shifting symbolism of Japanese cherry blossoms, which came to be linked with Kamikaze soldiers during the Second World War.
Ori Gersht is represented by the Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, Mummery+Schnelle, London, and Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
