ORI GERSHT: TWO VIDEOS Opens at The Jewish Museum Today, 10/19

The Jewish Museum is presenting Ori Gersht: Two Videos, an installation in the Museum's Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center from today, October 19, 2012 through March 24, 2013. Ori Gersht makes videos and photographs on borders, thresholds, and transitions in time and place. In Dew (2001, 3 min., 17 sec.), dew on the artist's lens evaporates to reveal the landscape of the Negev Desert.

Two hours of film were condensed into three minutes, so that changes in the harshly beautiful landscape become a poetic metaphor for other kinds of changes, political and personal. Neither Black nor White (2001, 4 min., 45 sec.) was filmed from the Jewish quarter of Nazareth looking onto the Arab village of Iksal. Half a second was recorded every thirty minutes to show city lights at night dimming as the sun rose on the village over a ten-hour period.

Ori Gersht (born 1967, Tel Aviv) lives and works in London. His work has been widely exhibited internationally at the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish Museum, New York; and other venues. Artworks by him are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum; Tate Gallery, London; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gersht is currently receiving his first major survey exhibition, Ori Gersht: History Repeating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (through January 6, 2013).