Wednesday, November 4, 2009 06:00pm Distinguished Artist Lecture: Ori Gersht Free and open to the public
Ori Gersht is one of the most renowned Israeli artists living today.
His internationally acclaimed works in photography and video are poetic, visually enthralling, and often fraught with complex, underlying contradictions. In this lecture, Gersht will speak about his work in Hugging and Wrestling in relation to life in Israel today, connecting his exploration of history, memory, and metaphor. He will discuss the relationship between photography and reality and the dialects of remembering, erasing, and forgetting. Gersht will also screen and speak about Evaders, 2009, his most recent video about Walter Benjamin’s tragic attempt to escape Nazi Germany. Throughout , Gersht will reflect upon photographic practice today, its relationship to the art of the past, and its key role as one of the most important means of artistic expression in contemporary art.
Ori Gersht’s work has been shown in major international museums including the Tate Britain, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as numerous international commercial galleries. His work is in many prestigious public collections including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Tate in London.
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1967. Gersht received an MA in Photography from the Royal Collect of Art, London; and a BA (with Honors) in Photography, Film & Video from the University of Westminster, London. He lives and works in London.
