The Forest - Ori Gersht, 2007

Ori Gersht’s The Forest evokes emotions frame by frame, narrating dark moments in history. Shot deep in the Moskolovka Forest in the Ukraine, The Forest echoes the violent history of this border territory contested by Ukranians, Poles, Russians and Germans. Ori Gersht records a series of graceful, processional pans across bands of individual trees. Gradually the eye notices a number of trees mysteriously falling, with the soundtrack amplifying the sound of each crash.

“An elegy for the nameless dead lost in wartime atrocities in this region, the piece enacts the kind of ceaseless vigil that will be needed if these crimes are not to be repeated. The Forest is a uniquely powerful work, unstinting and indelibly haunting, it combines a terrible sadness with a quiet yet formidable strength”. (Steven Bode, Tracks in the Forest, from the accompanying catalogue Ori Gersht The Clearing).

Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv in 1967 and graduated from London’s Royal Collage of Art in 1995. His politically-charged message exposes a dark perspective on contemporary society. His work has been showcased at the Galerie Martin Kudlek in Cologne, Germany with the touring exhibition The Knowledge Factory organized by The British Council and the Photographer’s Gallery, and was the subject of a major solo exhibition in his native Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

When previously shown in the Tate Gallery in London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, it was observed that his work affords us a view, realizing our dream to be merely a fly-on-the-wall witness to an enormous event we could never access otherwise. (Timothy Liu, Art Paper).

The Forest and related photographic exhibition The Clearing have drawn high profile international media attention. The Guardian’s Culture section dedicated three pages to The Clearing in December 2005. Roy Exley of Flash Art called the work “part of the subtle infiltration of a neo-Romantic sensibility into that vacuum left by the disappearance and abjection of irony in the early 90’s.
Evening Standard critic Hephzibah Anderson saw the work as both “historically and emotionally loaded.”