'Liquidation' is a series of photographs created in the course of a journey into the past, the lost past, the past that once was so tangible and real, the past that evaporated and disappeared. This journey back to the southwest region of the Ukraine was a journey into the darkest times, the time of Nazi occupation and the brutal elimination of the entire Jewish community. The landscape is there, unchanged, the villages are there as ever before, but simultaneously all has gone, evaporated from the surface. Ghost, traces but mainly voids.

Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. He now lives and works in London. He studied on the MA course at the Royal College of Art, London between 1993 and 1995. Recent exhibitions include White Noise, Noga Gallery of contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, and Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne, 2001; and Pitch, Chisenhale Gallery, 2000.

Gersht’s photographic process uniquely incorporates specific environmental conditions with an awareness of memory, experience, and embedded history. There is a defined relationship of this in how the photographic medium is engaged. With an understanding of the chemical and physical limitations of film, of which Gersht is never shy to push the boundaries of, that often turns out to be a more dimensional and resonant vehicle for portraying a mechanism of meaning through the imprint of time, light, and phenomena that perhaps expose the capacity and limitations of human memory as well.

Gersht’s work has often been an exploration of his personal origins, it is always through his departures into new and sometimes revisited landscapes where, along the way, are found the means and conditions of making his images. At times the passing motion of a train window’s vantage or the evaporating dew on the camera lens, there is always a specific notion of how these places were encountered and how the resulting pictures of them come to be, not in the mere passivity of the camera’s frame, but with a physical engagement with the place and its conditions.

Images and text courtesy of Noga Gallery, Israel

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