‘The series calls into question our familiarity with our own natural habitat, pointing out the gulf between the sky that we believe we know, and that of the photographs: a gap between the mechanical, attentive and unassumptive vision of the camera, and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye.’
“Shot without filters or other manipulation, they record dramatic skies above London and explore the optical effects that the light and atmospheric pollution of the city have on the sky above. Gersht uses the sky as a canvas for his experiments with the physical properties of photography. Through colour saturation, these almost abstract images assert both the primacy of natural light (the raw material of photography) and the ability of colour photography to interpret it.”
- Ori Gersht at the V&A, Twilight exhibition
“When I was looking at the landscape in the Ukraine I was seeing all these houses and trees that were there 60 years before and are living there now with total indifference to the human horrors that took place but somehow bear within them the memory of those events. Our sense of time as human beings is limited to 70 or 80 years but all these landscapes spread over a cosmic or geological perception of time. Some of the trees are hundreds and hundreds of years old, they bear with them the memory of all previous events and at the same time keep a certain silence and are impenetrable.”
- An excerpt from an interview with Ori Gersht by Camilla Jackson, Senior Curator at the The Photographers Gallery in London.
“Ori Gersht made Big Bang in 2006 specially for this exhibition. In it, he 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 colour before darkness descends.
Created as the culmination of this exhibition, Big Bang goes beyond the notion of twilight as a potent-laden threshold from one state to another. Instead, it explores its breaking point, the moment of transition.”
- Written to accompany the exhibition Twilight.
Ori Gersht, Big Bang, 2006 from Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art on Vimeo.
I saw this video at the V&A a few years back at the Twilight exhibition. In a darkened room with the gradual build up of sound, most jumped when the ‘big bang’ happened. Effecting, beautiful and mesmerising!
