| art.description.project | "Exhibitions often come about as a result of encounters—with works, an emotion, an image, an idea. Works too sometimes come into being as a result of encounters—with a set of questions, a story, a memory, a place, people. The works of Esther Shalev-Gerz fall into that category. They open up time-spaces in order to apprehend what was the first impulse behind their realization—be it in the time taken up by the projection of slides or a video, or in the space taken up by the image and the installation. Image and sound enter into dialogue, or suspend their concordance to make it possible to see better, or hear better. Between Telling and Listening: before making this the title of her exhibition, Esther Shalev-Gerz used it in the titles of two of her works. One in 2002, a magnificent two phase portrait of a woman between two cultures, two places, two timeframes (White Out—Between Telling and Listening); the other in 2005, an impressive installation commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945–2005). Between what is articulated and what is heard, there is the image, Jacques Ranciere tells us, that is the place where the meeting with the viewer becomes possible: “One is not in front of, nor in the place of— one is always between. The thing has to be understood in two senses: to be between is to belong to a certain type of community, a constructed and precarious community that does not define itself in terms of shared identity but in terms of possible sharing. But that which is to be shared is itself caught within a sharing, traveling between two beings, two places, two acts. What can be termed the image is actually the movement of this translation.”2
“To be between” likewise presupposes the discomfort of never being wholly in our place; it is being both here and there, both in- and outside what is seen, or done, or said. “To be between” necessarily implies movement, displacement. And consequently the question of place; of the linking of places with one another; of our relationship to them. In Inseparable Angels: An Imaginary House for Walter Benjamin (2000) and in Still/Film (2009), Esther Shalev-Gerz films and photographs the gap between places, travels from one to the other to try and capture the possible link between Weimar on the one hand and Buchenwald on the other, between Alytus where her mother lived and Vilnius where she herself was born. As if the time taken in traveling from one place to the other also made it possible to capture what those places were at another time, for people other than us. Like portraits of landscapes that might echo portraits of people. In her very first photographic works, Esther Shalev-Gerz already worked on these return journeys between two places, but at that time within one and the same image, at the folding point between two realities.
Thus in Just One Sky (1987–1989), the artist photographed the city of Jerusalem—which she left in 1984—from different angles, then superimposed those images, so juxtaposing areas that were not next to one another in reality. Or later, in Daedal(us) (2003), a project carried out with the help and cooperation of the residents of a district in Dublin, photographs of facades were projected onto other buildings, so that there was collusion between two places and two times— that of the taking of the view, and that of its projection. “Being between” is also being between two or several languages, all present to a greater or lesser extent, all associated with specific contexts, but which travel for that very reason. Lithuanian,
Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, French in the case of the artist; Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, and English in the case of Rola Younes, the young woman whose portrait is in dialogue with that of Jacques Ranciere in the video On Two (2009), and whose songs give body to the different languages and the affects they convey in the space occupied by the installation.
The Portraits of Stories (1998–2008), White Out—Between Telling and Listening (2002), Does Your Image Reflect Me? (2002), First Generation (2004), Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945–2005 (2005), On Two (2009), The Last Click (2010): Esther Shalev-Gerz’s entire oeuvre can be assimilated to incessant work on the question of the portrait. As often as not filmed in still shots, the people she talks to answer questions, tell stories, are suspended in the instant that precedes speech, or in the instant of listening—
istening to the words of others or their own pronouncements, which have also become “other” through the distance introduced by the device of filming. One of the most striking forms of “portrait” is in the installation MenschenDinge—The Human Aspect of Objects (2004–2006). Commissioned to create a project for the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial, Esther Shalev-Gerz chose to invite museum professionals to talk—the director, a historian, an archaeologist, a female restorer, and a female photographer: people who are in daily contact with the objects found in the grounds of the camp. They talk about their encounters—professional, personal, and imaginary—with these objects created or diverted by the detainees. Thus it is through portraits of individuals located in the present that portraits of those who fashioned these objects are recreated, tokens of humanity within a totalitarian system intended to divest them totally of that quality."
From a statement by Nicole Schweizer, curator of the exhibition. | |
