Ori Gersht: Two Videos - Installation Opens October 19 at the Jewish Museum

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum is presenting Ori Gersht: Two Videos, an installation in the Museum’s Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center from 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).

Located on the third floor of The Jewish Museum, the Goodkind Media Center houses a digital library of radio and television programs from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). It also features a changing exhibition space dedicated to video and new media. Using computer workstations, visitors are able to search material by keyword and by categories such as art, comedy, drama, news, music, kids, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Media programs at The Jewish Museum are supported by the Martin and Doris Payson Fund for Film and Media.

About the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting

The National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, founded in 1981 in association with the Charles H. Revson Foundation, is the largest and most comprehensive body of broadcast materials on 20th century Jewish culture in the United States. With a mission to collect, preserve and exhibit television and radio programs related to the Jewish experience, the NJAB is an important educational resource for critical examination of how Jews have been portrayed and portray themselves, and how the mass media has addressed issues of ethnicity and diversity. Its collection is comprised of 4,300 broadcast and cable television and radio programs.