Ori
Gersht

I create bodies of work that often poetically explore the relationships between history, memory, and landscape. Through metaphor, I illuminate the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories. Themes such as Dutch still life painting, romantic landscapes, and Nazi-occupied territory escape routes in the Pyrenees are steeped in my bodies of work. The imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty and violence. My work is influenced by my exploration of my 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 lifes explode on screen. I approach these topics not simply through my choice of imagery, but by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth. I am perhaps best known for my work with slow-motion capture, wherein I produce images and video portraying fruits, flowers, and other material fracturing when struck by high velocity gunfire.