Ori Gersht

'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 un-assumptive vision of the camera, and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye.’

Ori Gersht’s work is concerned with the relationships between history, memory and landscape. He often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories. Gersht approaches this challenge not simply through his choice of imagery, but by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth. Frequently referencing art history, Gersht's imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty, violence and other troubling aspects within human society . This has included an exploration of his own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, a series of post-conflict landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow-motion films in which traditional still lives explode on screen.

Gersht’s Rear Windowseries was developed over a period of two years; taking photographs from the same window in his flat. Shot without filters or other manipulation, they record dramatic skies above London and explore the optical effects that the heavily polluted atmosphere of the city has on the sky above, using the sky as a canvas for his experiments with the physical properties of photography.